Jinwoo Lim finds himself trapped in a subway station he's never seen before. As monsters begin hunting trapped survivors, Jinwoo meets Suyeon and Sangjoon, and they must fight their way to escape. But during an attack, one of the creatures tears out Jinwoo's eye. People who are injured by the monsters eventually become monsters themselves. Jinwoo soon realizes that his eye is beginning to change, but if someone leaves the station before transforming into a monster, their body returns to normal outside. Will they make it out alive or will it be too late?

Platform Zero has a story by yamka and art by Sunhee Kim. English localization by WEBTOON. Published by WEBTOON (July 6, 2026). Rated M.

Erica Friedman
Rating:

Once again, we have a zombie story in which “monster” is transmissible. Jinwoo is a young man who ends up on an apparently abandoned subway platform only to find that it is actually full of horrifically mutated monsters. Any wound they cause becomes a ravenous mouth, no matter where on the body it is. Monsterization as contagion is the ultimate “othering.” The setting is so banal and so familiar to anyone who uses mass transit that it's instantly relatable that malformed creatures wander the platforms.

This premise allows for some really creative art: how does a face, or an eye socket, or a leg become a mouth? How does a body with extra mouths where sensory perception used to be function? Why do the monsters attack? And of course, how do they escape? This is always the fundamental plot of a horror story – can they last, and who gets out? Jinwoo rescues a girl, and together they are saved by yet another survivor, but none of them are unharmed. The scenario presents some interesting conundrums. Now that they too are becoming monsters, what does “saved” even mean? Jinwoo's eye socket is clearly a monster's mouth. Even should they survive this hellish world, there's no guarantee that they will return to normal, as Sangjoon Han insists.

What is Platform Zero? Why is Jinwoo here and how does he get out? These are questions that hopefully will be answered in future chapters. For now, the conundrums are left unexplained.

If you're fond of zombie, plague, or monster apocalypse stories set in an everyday setting, you'll probably get a kick out of Platform Zero.

Bolts
Rating:

Wow, talk about nightmare fuel. Some horror stories have a lot of slow build-up and setup to draw you into a really uncomfortable atmosphere. Then there are stories like this that just throw you into a supernatural circumstance filled with gruesome nightmare imagery. Platform Zero is definitely the latter as it follows a young boy named Jinwoo Lim who wakes up in a nightmare hellscape being chased by what feels like Resident Evil zombies. The name of the game is survival for a good chunk of the first couple of chapters, with slight context clues being given with regards to how to survive or how the horrors of this world work. However, the story is very slow to reveal the exact nature of where the characters find themselves, but I don't think that's the point. The point isn't to get answers as much as it is just to survive, and for a high-stakes, high-tension type of situation, this story does that in spades.

I love how macabre the presentation is. Not only does everything look very sketchy and smeared, but the selective use of the color red helps certain things pop. I love the way that the sky emulates red fog, and highlighting things like red in the blood only under particular circumstances really helps make everything feel a lot more violent on the page. This is a story not for the faint of heart, and not a story that can necessarily convert people who are overly squeamish about this type of subject matter. Rather, this is a story for people who like to indulge in those creepy zombie stories where all hope seems lost.

There are some chapters that try to make the circumstances feel a bit more psychological or driven by human instinct. Some creatures are heavily informed by the malice of humanity, but I also don't feel like the story is trying to say anything particularly potent with these scenes outside of just “humanity sucks, and maybe some of these people were monsters well before they came face-to-face with real monsters.” Again, very basic. But for a set up like this, I don't think the story ever promises anything more than that. It delivers on the over-the-top creepy violence, and if that is something that you're looking for, then enjoy.