Anime Review: Yona of the Dawn

As probably everyone already knows, I have been a huge fan of the Akatsuki no Yona manga for years so I was happy was an anime adaptation was announced, thrilled when I heard it was going to be two cours (since adapting any part of the story into just 13 episodes was going to be a mess), and then shocked when it was picked up by Funimation from the get-go, I guess successes like Kamisama Kiss are making people a little less hesitant about shojo again. So why do I love this show so much? Well, this adaptation does a pretty good job at explaining it!

Yona of the Dawn

Manhwa Review: Goong: The Royal Palace (1-3)

Another title I was happy to find at the not so local library since I had read a lot of gushing for it over at the Manga Bookshelf but none of the other libraries I had been to had any of the books. Actually it's interesting, after going to so many different libraries over the years you can really tell which ones had a librarian (or more than one) who was really dedicated to buying manga and you can even tell when they started. This library must have started putting together it's collection in the early 2000s judging from the age of some of the books which is fascinating since I remember around 2005 when I first discovered manga my library had a few books but didn't really start getting more until 2009 and even then seems to have stopped in favor of buying more graphic novels instead. I just find all this fascinating, it provides an odd look into another book lover's mind.

Goong: The Royal Palace by So Hee Park

Summary: In an alternate world Korea still has it's monarchy and much like the British Crown it wields some power and has a great deal of pomp and circumstance. With it's crown prince coming of age the family feels the pressure to marry him off and recall a promise the old king made to his friend, to marry his heir to his daughter. Neither of the young people in question, Prince Shin Lee and average girl Che-Kyung are at all happy with this arrangement but neither of them can break it for now and must go through the show of being a happily married husband and wife.

The Good: Well I learned some real-world history but probably not in the way the creator meant to concerning the Korean monarchy (it seems it was dissolved during World War II which, sadly, was way too recently for any of my history classes to have covered) which was interesting. I did like the politics as well, I can easily see how some problems that some characters are starting in these volumes could take quite a while to resolve, but sadly that's about the only part about the volumes I did enjoy and the politics at this point are still only a sub-plot.

The Bad: Let me put it this way, the library had all the volumes so I planned to try and get through them all before I moved so I could have one large review yet I didn't and it wasn't for lack of time. After the third volume I gave up, Che-Kyung was too odd, Shin Lee was frankly an ass, heck I couldn't sympathize with any of the characters except for a few minor side ones, the other prince creeped me out a bit for no specific reason, didn't care about the "romance" and found the humor completely unfunny (part of which had to do with the art style). This was completely not my cup of tea, I had hoped for a stronger focus on politics (which may have come later and there was quite a bit of politics, don't get me wrong there) but the "romance" just killed it for me.

The Art: As mentioned earlier, the art for the comedic moments also really threw me out of the series, for some reason Park decides to use these really ugly chibis so I spent all my time just cringing at them instead of possibly laughing at them which isn't a good thing. The rest of the time the art looked rather lovely actually but the chibis come up pretty often which I thought was a bummer. 

In the end I'm only going to give these three volumes 2.5 out of 5 stars and don't intend to read the rest. I'm sure some people will really like this, and for those who do the series is licensed in North America by Yen Press, but I'm not one of them.

Manhwa Review: Moon Boy

So I realized a few weeks ago that if I didn't do anything I would be out of reviews by today (I never did a chance to read my friend's copy of Sailor Moon) and decided that to be on the safe side I should go ahead and grab a number of manhaw titles I had come across at the library before, thought they looked kinda interesting, and just check them out. So here's the first of that bunch, I've got three volume ones to talk about, let's get started!

Moon Boy by Lee Young You

Summary: Myung-Ee is a regular fifth grader, abet a bit more boy-crazy than most of her friends, but does have an odd quirk, her eyes turn red when the moon rises. She mentions this to a boy in her class, Yu-Da Lee, who has the same thing happen to him and it turns out that they are both rabbits from the moon who fled to Earth to hide from hunting foxes. Shortly after this he vanishes and no one remembers anything about Yu-Da until Myung-Ee finds him five years later only to find that he doesn’t remember anything about his old life either.

The Good: It’s an interesting concept, I don’t know a lot about Asian mythology (especially Korean mythology in particular) but I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea of rabbits living on the moon was an actual story and not just made up for this manhaw and I’d like to see that idea expanded upon. Right now the pacing is a bit awkward so while Myung-Ee does not come off as much of a self-centered, annoying lead as you would expect it’s hard to tell just what she is since she hasn’t had any time to even take in what’s happened so far. And at this point that’s really all I can say about the story, it could be rather interesting but so little has actually happened that it’s hard to say how well it will turn out.

The Bad: As odd as it sounds, I really liked the story before it time-skipped, odd because it’s about a boy-obsessed fifth grader and nothing is explained but I just didn’t like the characters introduced later on. While the conflict had some potential for cool the random characters just me completely uninterested in the plot and didn’t make me want to pick up another volume. If the pacing had been smoother, and one or two more events had happened, I probably would have looked around for more on the story but just the promise of a possibly cool story just isn’t enough to sell me on it.

The Art: Much like my complaints with the story, I greatly prefer the pre-timeskip character designs to the regular designs, I couldn’t even tell Yu-Da was the same character until some of the bad guys confirmed that Myung-Ee wasn’t crazy. Style-wise the art here looks a lot like generic manga art that I’ve seen dozens of times before, lots of screentones, background only appearing when necessary to a shot and more chibis than I’d like. It’s not bad, unless you count some characters changing so much in five years that they’re unrecognizable bad (and in all fairness that does happen to some people with puberty), it just didn’t catch my eye.

It appears that Yen Press has taken over the license for this series (unsuprisingly, they've licensed a lot more manhaw that most people seem to realize) and I might pick up the second volume if I ever came across it but right now I don't have the urge to go out and actively look for it.

Webcomic Review Month 2012: Fall On Me, Fishbones, The Fox Sister

Since one can never have too many webcomics (okay yes you can but roll with me here) I found out about this webcomic tournament over on ComicMix this morning and encourage everyone to go over, see their list of nominations (which I believe is over 200 comics) and if you have any comics to give them a vote. I don't really care who wins in the end but it's a great way for smaller comics to get exposure, all of the comics are currently updating ones which is more than I can say for some of my reviews, and I was even able to find out that a comic or two I liked had come off of hiatus thanks to the list, so go on over there!
Side note, I think I have the creators of The Fox Sister correct but I'm still really tired so if I got them wrong someone please correct me sooner rather than later. Last year's reviews.

Fall on Me by Adriana Blake
 A simple autobiographical, slice of life comic dealing with daily life for Adriana Blake and her husband.

There are a surprising number of (semi-) autobiographical webcomics out there, tvtropes calls them journal comics as a catch-all term, and what's even more amazing is the amount of variety you can get from a rather mundane and ordinary topic. This one chooses to focus on the cute moments between Blake and her husband and succeeds in being cute but not overly sugarly. It's perhaps not the best comic to marathon in one go, it reminds me a bit of Aria in the sense that it's much more about the interaction between the people and there's no "plot" to connect everything together, but it's a nice pick me up to read a few times a week. The series is also translated by the author into Spanish, I don't come across many webcomics that have been translated so I'll try to note that whenever it comes up.

 

Fishbones written by Jisuk Cho and illustrated by Yuki S.

 Set in a fictional city on the east coast of the US back in 1999 Ferris Levinstein would be perfectly content with a quiet, everyday life but with family in the mob that sometimes seems like a pipe dream. Of course, no one has ever asked him to join the family, or even talks about it in front of him except for his friend Demos, but who knows how long that will last.

I only warmed up to this series recently, when I initially tried it there wasn't a lot published and so far the story has been very character driven and you need a solid amount of page/screen time to establish a character. I do hope the story becomes a bit more plot driven later on, it involves the Mafia after all, there's just so much room for fun there, but the characters have interesting dynamics and I'd like to see a lot more of those explored as well. No clue where the story will end up going but for the moment it's an interesting read and I'll be continuing with it. It also appears to have a Russian translation

   

The Fox Sister by Jayd "Chira" Ait-Kaci and Christina Strain

Set in 1960s South Korea, Cho Yun Hee and her sister seem to be the only survivors of a fire that killed their parents but Yun Hee knows the truth, it was a kumiho that killed them and it seems to have taken the form of her older sister in the mean time. It's been years since then but it seems that the kumiho is still stalking her and trying to finish what it started while also becoming close to an American named Alex who has taken an interest in Yun Hee and her dog.

Another comic that is still relatively new but it has a good start under it's belt and it seems like a number of things are about to be explained so I feel confident recommending it to people. It's not obvious from the banner but the art has a very nice feeling to it, it's not quite as detailed as some other comics but the smooth lines manage to convey a lot of motion and emotion in the characters so I feel like too much detail would actually clutter the art and take away from that (and it's not like there is no detail work in the comics as well, there's actually a surprising amount when you look closely at the artwork). I'm also really curious about the setting, since I don't read as much manhaw as I do manga I almost never find stories set in Korea and I never find historical fiction set after 1940s, period*. I feel like those are enough reasons to recommend this comic, even if it it's a bit on the short side now, and hope that it continues as strongly as it started.

*ironically enough, many American school never find enough time to really teach any history after world war II as well so without a textbook or historical fiction my knowledge of the time period is especially sketchy, hence why I'm excited to actually see a story set then.