It's also one of the first manhwa that I ever read, way back when TokyoPop was still, to me anyway, that company doing unflipped manga in the late 90s. I actually originally picked up the first volume of PRIEST because, having been introduced to and grown accustomed to the single-issue flipped manga published by Dark Horse, Eclipse and VIZ, I didn't like reading unmodified manga because the right-to-left orientation felt strange enough to me to turn me off the format. When I saw PRIEST, I was thrilled to find something new to me that was "flipped" (and later realized that it wasn't flipped at all, because hangul, the Korean language, reads left-to-right like western languages do) and bought the first volume. If I'm honest, I don't think I cared for it much at the time, but when the film came out, I decided to give it another try and bought the above-pictured 3-in-1 omnibus edition TokyoPop published to coincide with the film's release. It's drastically different from the film, and on being reintroduced to it, I loved it.
If you aren't familiar with the manhwa (which really only shares a name in common with the film "adaption"), PRIEST is the story of Ivan Isaacs, a priest who has sold half his soul to a devil (not the Devil) named Belial in order to gain the power necessary to fight the fallen angel Temozarela, whom Isaac holds responsible for a number of crimes, including destroying the love of his life. Temozarela, along with a host of 11 other fallen angels, planned to show God the error of His ways by proving angel-kind superior to human-kind, whom God prefers. God, being all-knowing, learned of it and punished Temozarela by trapping him on Earth as a statue from which he escaped millions of years later. Predictably, Temozarela wants revenge.
That's really all you need to know about the series' plot. It's full of action, moral questions, religious questions and a lot of blood.
Many in the west don't realize this, but Korea is a predominantly Christian country--one of the few in Asia--and Hyung asks a lot of questions about the nature of God and man's relationship with Him, including whether something as cosmically-lowly as a human being can even have a relationship with his deity. The series occasionally gets pretty deep.
Even if you don't care about such things, or about western-horror action sequences, the art in the book is worth checking out. At first glance, it appears rough to the point of not being at a professional level, but it's deceptive. While his pencil-work is, indeed, rougher than you'd typically see in most comics, eastern or western, Hyung has a great sensibility for both shapes and use of negative space. The angular style of the artwork, along with the use of very heavy inks and large black spaces, often serves to make it appear almost more like a piece of black and white mosaic art than comic art, and when Hyung lightens up on the inks and lets the pencils show through on their own merits, there's a real sense of motion, fluidity and vitality that serves action sequences incredibly well.
I loved PRIEST. Even after 16 volumes of it, I wanted more; and here we come to the only thing about the series I didn't like - Hyung never finished it. It actually ended in the middle of a fight-scene, which is especially frustrating. After nearly six years of working on the book, in 2004 Hyung "took a break", ostensibly to do design work for the then-still-in-production PRIEST video game, and simply never returned to the series. He returned to comics fairly quickly, but when he did it was with a new series called GHOSTFACE, supposedly inspired by the American rapper of the same name.
With that in mind, I have mixed feelings about recommending the series. I did love it, but it's frustrating to know it'll never be finished. Hyung had originally indicated the series would run 30 volumes, so there's a lot more story to tell, but as it's been over a decade since he worked on it, it seems extremely unlikely we'll ever see those published.
If you're okay with that, definitely check out the first 16 volumes. They're fantastic.