Friday, March 18, 2011

Webcomic Review: Red String, Roza

Not much to say about these comics today, I'd rather be outside right now actually but the wi-fi at my school is, finicky, so like a true nerd I just stayed inside and did this instead, yay?

Red String
I remember seeing an ad for this series in the back of a Dark Horse book once and it took me a while to realize that it was in fact a webcomic (it's not longer published by Dark Horse by the way but I still come across volumes of it in bookstores sometimes). Set in Japan (even though the author is an American), the story initially focuses on Miharu Ogawa, a spunky young girl who comes home one day to find herself engaged. Annoyed by this (who wouldn't be?) she shortly afterwords runs into a young man in a park and the two of them strike up a friendship only to realize that they're the engaged couple* which sets up some interesting questions about choosing love. The story eventually expands to include the love lives of Miharu's friends and takes a few standard shojo cliches and messes with them. I've said before that I'm not a fan of romance series so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was well-thought out and that the characters weren't idiots about their situations. The art isn't as amazing as some other comics I've reviewed so far (but thankfully, unlike many shojo series, it doesn't suffer from screentone abuse) but it's pleasant enough and I got a print of FuukoxHanae last year at a convention^ and I hope to grab some of the books there this year. It's a nice story and I wouldn't mind rereading it and that's a good enough reason for a buy for me!


Roza
Starting out as a single chapter, Roza and the Horse Prince, Roza is the story of a girl (three guesses what her name is) who is traveling the world looking for a cure to her unusual curse, her blood turns into fire whenever she gets cut, very problematic. So far she's run into a number of other people, some magical some not (and one or two who are also cursed) and the story is taking a while to get moving. I feel like we're past the introduction at this point but it's been a while since the story properly updated so I'm a little hazy on what exactly is going on. In any case, the story is only in it's fourth chapter so it's still early on and I really do like the set-up/the plot so far, just update more please!


S goes up tomorrow but that will probably be split into two posts, I don't want to write up reviews for five or six comics at once so hopefully you guys won't mind!


*sine this happens in the first couple of chapters, and is pretty easy to see coming, I'm not calling it a spoiler. Plus, it would be really hard to explain everything else later without saying that much.
^actually, my mom let a friend of hers from out of town use my room for a night and I wondered if she saw that print since it's hanging by my bed, probably not since almost no one does but I had a laugh about it.