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: Full House

Just in case people didn't get the memo yesterday, I switched the comic and book reviews this week since I just hadn't gotten around to reading a comic as of yesterday so if you came here looking for a book review just go down to the next post. If you came here looking for a comic review then great, you're in the right place because I've got an odd one this week. Odd in the sense that, well, did everyone else know that the now-defunct publisher CPM (part of DC Comics) published manga and manhwa? I hadn't known that until a few weeks back when I stumbled upon a different title at my local used bookstore and was pretty surprised, I hadn't even realized manhwa was being printed in the US in 2004, heck the copyright page for this book (found at my not-so-local library) says it was on it's second printing too, madness! Which is also a good word to describe this story.....


 Full House by Soon Yon Won

Summary: Elle is an aspiring screenwriter living in a house that her late father had designed and is quite attached to it. She's confused and enraged to learn that the house has been sold and she's to be evicted as it's new owner, world famous actor Ryder Baye, prepares to move in yet somehow she ends up pretending to be engaged to him despite the fact that they hate each other's guts.

The Good: Well, it is a bit more unusual to come across manga/manhwa published in the US with adult characters (certainly not impossible but it's usually not what you find first) s that was, nice. I also ended up liking the character Miranda, Ryder's manager, more than I expected for her almost talent at looking at a bad situation and being positive about how it can work out well (and how this weirded out the other characters just a bit) and her scenes were the most fun to read.

The Bad: As a general disclaimer, I'm not a big fan of the "slap slap kiss" romance trope in general, I don't even get why fans will ship two characters together who (obviously to me) hate each other and call it "unresolved sexual tension", this just isn't my area of expertise. However, I think that a lot of people would agree with me that the slap slap kiss go on just far too long. Several times that situation goes down, things start to defuse, the characters walk away, aaaand then one comes back and it starts up all over again! I feel like the author just had no sense of timing (since I feel like slap slap kiss does require a bit of comedic timing to work well) and because of this I can't believe that the characters will ever have feelings for each other. This could be the rare work which doesn't pair up the characters in the very end but as it stands Yon Woo would have to do a lot of writing, and more convincing writing than right now, to make me fully believe that Elle and Ryder could actually fall in love with each other.

The Art: This is a bit random but is it just me or does Ryder look an awful lot like a lady on the cover? I'm well aware of the bishonen trope but if anyone was to pick up this story and think it was a lesbian love story between a pretty girl and a more androgynous girl I wouldn't blame them. Not that you would make that mistake once you looked at the back cover (on which the characters look more like high school students than adults) or within the story itself, although at that point you might be having more trouble with figuring out the reading order of more than a few oddly laid pages (the rapid fire pace of the slap slap kiss made it even worse for me).


This one gets a 1.5 out of 5 stars since I didn't like it, don't think anyone can convince me to read more of it and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even if you like this sort of romance I will go out of my way to find a better example of it for you to read, although this does mean that the series has won the dubious distinction of being the first CPM work that I've actively disliked, I'm almost impressed. 

Manhwa Review: Lizzie Newton: Victorian Mysteries Volume 1

Now here's a title I wasn't expecting to talk about today, somehow (I think I saw it as an ad on a webcomic) I found a website that Seven Seas had set up where they were going to upload a few pages each week of this book until it's release and I read along and enjoyed it quite well (although I just found out that they only had license to have it up as a webcomic for a year and that expired earlier in the month). However I thought they were missing the last chapter/half a chapter since A) the page count number didn't match up and B) it was a rather awkward place to end since the criminal had been identified but not caught (and I wasn't going to review just part of a volume). Today however I was in a bookstore and caught site of the book so I decided to see how much was left and I discovered that in fact the entire first volume had been published online, the remaining pages were devoted to a one-shot. So this is now totally fair game for me to review, good thing since I was really wondering how to classify this one and when I'd get around to it otherwise.

Lizzie Newton: Victorian Mysteries Volume 1 story by Hey-Jin Jeon and art by Kiha Lee

Summary: Elizabeth "Lizzie" Newton is a young lady who is more interested in writing her mystery stories (which she's become rather well known for) than dealing with some of her more tedious social duties but when she stumbles upon a crime scene during one of these events she can't help but investigate a bit herself. There she discovers that what looks like a simple suicide is in fact a murder and drags her fiancee Edwin into her investigation to solve what the police don't even know is there. 

The Good: While you can't exactly figure out the mystery yourself from all the clues (something which happens very rarely for me in any mystery regardless of medium however) the characters are rather meticulous explaining the details later so it feels like a well-thought out mystery that's complicated enough to remain unnoticed if you're not looking for a mystery but still within the range of what a clever person could solve. Lizzie is a spunky heroine and, while not highly original, is likable enough and her banter with Edwin worked well (although the story dropped a few hints that there's more to him than we/Lizzie know and I just hope the story won't take forever to address that). It's a first volume so it's rough around the edges at parts but it's completely grabbed me and I would quite like to read more and see where the series ends up going.  

The Bad: As alluded to earlier, this volume ends in a really awkward place and has the page room for more story and I much would have rather had this story completely wrapped up in one volume. Unless the story was just a bit too long for one volume and they decided to delay it to stretch over two volumes instead of having it carry over just a bit and then start a new story, that would actually make sense. That is my biggest complaint and, well, an unsatisfying ending is a rather large complaint especially with the two volumes (I don't know if the second one is the finale or if the series is on-going) being published six months apart. Pretty much everything else that can be called a flaw (not yet rounded characters, character interaction also comes off as a bit flat at times) can be easily explained by the fact that this is a first volume, it's a really solid first installment all things considered.

The Art: Ms. Silverman on ANN has already talked about the details in the art with more authority than I have so go read her review for that and I'll just talk more generally. And the art is pleasant, I was actually surprised to hear that this was a manhwa because previously the art I've seen from manhwa has been much more stylized (in different ways though) and this just looked like a webcomic that has more shojo roots than some.


So I give this 4 stars out of 5 and fully plan on buying this and the next volume when I get a chance, especially since it looks like this is the end of the free preview on the site (which makes sense since it was more than generous, just wish there had been a little note saying "End of Volume 1" somewhere) 

Manhwa Review: Travelers from the Moon

And here we have the third and final manhwa that I found at my library recently, really there's not much else to say to introduce it. I have to admit that all of this has sparked by interest in what else is out there, I had always wondered how large the manhwa industry is in Korea and it must be larger than I had previously thought, but I'm not sure where to go from here to keep looking into titles.

Travelers of the Moon by Lee Na Hyeon

Summary: “There’s nothing more important than friendship!” In a world where vampires are nearly extinct, Yuh-Ur wakes up one morning to discover that the injured bat her father brought home from a trip is not only fully healed but also a vampire. Unsure what to think about this she becomes even more worried by this development when it appears that a fellow classmate has been attacked by a vampire, although Ida doesn’t seem like the type to go around hurting people….

The Good: Plot-wise this was the strongest of the three manhaw I had checked out, feeling neither like a rip-off of something else and having a plot that made sense and did make me curious about what happened next. The characters also had a pretty good debate about whether or not to trust Ida and their ideas and experiences fleshed out the side characters much more than I was expecting. There is a limit to how much story you can tell in one volume in an on-going story but this story did a lot more in it's first volume than a lot of stories I've read.

The Bad: I did wonder if the first chapter was meant to be a one-shot that later got picked up for a full story since it focused on a completely different character, Ida’s personality seemed rather different, and Yuh-Ur didn’t even make an appearance. I also had a hard time keeping all the character’s names straight, partially due to the odd order and pacing of the story and finally, while there certainly is room for a longer story I think I would have been happier if this had been a single volume work. That’s just personal preference on my part, although perhaps future volumes would be able to explain the series’ odd title. Also, that quote in the summary is the only bit of information on the back cover of the manhwa and you really need more than that if you hope to get buyer/library goer's attention.

The Art: The art is rather conventional, no odd panel shape or placement, lots of screen tones used to fill in objects and backgrounds, there’s not a lot worth noting. While I do have complaints on how the story was paced the panels themselves flowed well and all in all I don’t have any complaints about the art, just no praise either.

As a heads up, I'm heading to a con tomorrow and Sunday so tomorrow's review will be up rather early. I would say that Sunday's review will be up late but since I'm posting this one near midnight anyway (I will blame my brother's graduation for that one) I don't think most people will notice a difference there. 

Manhwa Review: Ark Angels

Originally I wanted to have a post about the comics avaliable on Free Comic Book Day but decided that since A) it was already over a week later and B) I still can't figure out where the print copies I got went (I just had to move all my stuff again and it seems like those comics are what got lost this time) so it seemed a bit pointless. I will say however that I was pretty disappointed with the two I had to get online (my comic book store, which is now tiny, out of the way, and has absolutely nothing I want to buy, didn't have copies of them), Infernal Devices and Finding Gossameyer were both completely underwhelming, although when you only have FOUR pages it's kinda hard to make a good impression (I can't remember the last time the first four pages of a comic really made me want to read the rest, stuff like this and the JManga previews confuse me greatly). So instead you get the next installment in "random manhwa found at my library" and it's spelled correctly this time too!

Ark Angels by Sang-Sun Park

Summary: Shem, Hamu, and Japheth are three sisters who, when filling in for their father at a conference to discuss Earth’s future, were given the task to travel through time and save endangered animals (seen through their eyes as anthropomorphized animals) and turn back Earth’s doomsday clock. When not traveling they’ve transferred to a new school and one of Japheth’s classmates may not be what they seem…..

The Good: The three sisters were a bit more rounded than I expected, especially the main character Japheth, and there was just enough intrigue to keep me interested. The chapters that focused on rare animals dragged a bit but overall the volume was well-paced and I was curious enough that if I came across another volume I’d try it out as well, although not so curious I plan on actively seeking it out. It does seem to be completely published in the US and only runs three volumes and oddly enough that short length does make me more willing to read more of it, although it makes me wonder how basic the plot will become (or if it will stay as basic as it is) with such a short length.

The Bad: This manhaw reminds me an awful lot of Petshop of Horrors and, as I mentioned before, maybe if I hadn’t read so much of PoH first then I might have liked this better*. I doubt it though, PoH was interesting, could tell the same basic story over and over again before it lost it's luster, and had a polish that this series simply doesn't have. In the end I'd recommend Petshop of Horrors over this story and can't think of any situation where I would recommend this story at all.

The Art: The art feels rather standard and, well, exactly what you would expect for a series featuring anthropomorphized animals aimed at a female audience. I really liked the illustration on the cover with the soft watercolors and I wish the art had looked a little more like that (it wouldn’t have worked in watercolors the way it is, the panels are just too full and almost cluttered, but I can almost see it looking something like DOOR: ToiletGenie if the art had been tweaked some). As I find myself saying so often these days, nothing wrong with the art but I’ve just seen so much that looks like this that I want something a bit different.

Stronger than last week's title but still nothing worth writing home about. I do feel rather bad that it seems like I don't like manhwa at all but rather I just don't run across many titles that I like which makes me think that manhwa is very much like manga, there's a lot out there but not a lot that anyone person is going to like. Of course, if ones that nobody likes get published and nobody likes them then the publishing companies won't keep licensing them, a chicken and egg situation...

*on a funny note, this was an older Tokyopop release which had recommendations on other series by the editors including one for the author’s other series, Tarot Card Café, where the editor compared that to Petshop of Horrors, I guess that one had the shop part and this one had the magical animals part?

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.

Manhaw Review: The Story of Life on the Golden Fields Series

Since this is a bit of an obscure title, I had to look it up to see if this triology even had a series title, I'm talking about the manhaw books The Color of Earth, The Color of Water, and The Color of Heaven. I first came across The Color of Earth three years ago at the library where I worked and thought it was okay when I read it and didn't read the other two book simply because the library didn't have them. Actually, looking at the publishing dates, the third book wouldn't have been published at this time (this was July 2009) and the second book would have been too recent to be in the library system, I was under the impression all three were already published however since the covers for all of them were on the back of The Color of Earth. Regardless, a few months back I was glancing through a post your manga shelves column and noticed these three books and remembered that I had seen the first and the third at the local library near my school. I checked out the first book and decided that if I could find the second one I would review all three and lo and behold they did have it, it was just apparently checked out every time I had gone by before. I was a bit worried that I wouldn't like the series at all since I hadn't been crazy about it before but thankfully that wasn't the case and I found myself enjoying being back home with the comfy chairs and reading for hours.

The Color of Earth, The Color of Water, The Color of Heaven by Dong Hwa Kim

Summary: Set in an earlier time, these three books chronical the life of Ewa, a girl growing up in rural Korea as she discovers love. From her first love to marriage the story shows her high points and low points and, just as importantly, shows her close relationship with her mother and her mother's journey as a widow in love with a traveling salesman.

The Good: It's unusal, but not unheard of, for a parent to have a major role in a story that focuses on their child but I've never seen a story that gives a parent such a prominate role. Ewa's mother is pratically the co-protagonist and the two of them have a very good relationship, again something unusal but something I liked, especially since my mother and I have always been close and this is the most similar representation of our relationship that I've ever found in a work of fiction. I also really liked her mother's romantic relationship as well, it was never protrayed as wrong that an older widow could fall in love again, maybe I'm jaded but I'm so used to seeing stories that say "only your first love can be your true one!" that this was extremly refreshing.  While Ewa might seem a bit mature for her age she seems realisitically mature, she never did anything that made me stop and think that a young girl wouldn't act that way.

The Bad: While I could understand Ewa's crushes (by that I mean, understand why she had them) I could never figure out why her final love came to frutation. It was clear that the two characters loved each other but I just couldn't see how their meet cute first encounter drew them to each other. There were also a few subplots dealing with side characters that either got dropped or had such a subtle resolution that I missed it which did bother me a little bit. Finally, I'm not exactly a prude but I'm also not a fan of pages and pages of sexy-times and I swear that every metaphor for sex in all three volumes was used during Ewa's wedding night, I really would have liked that section to have been a bit shorter.

The Art: The art was on the simpler side, which worked nicely with the setting, but when you really looked at a page you would see that many scenes were just crammed with details. It was a nice change of pace from the kind of art I normally see and was consistently lovely. I do wish there had been a way to print some of the colored pages that appeared in the front of each volume, I liked how the cover images were colored so I'm curious how the actual pages were colored.


When I read through a foreword in one of the books I discovered that this is considered "sunjung manhaw" in Korea which is their equivalent of shojo manga and I thought "well THAT explains why I'm loving this!" It doesn't sound like the author (a guy which really surprised me, while it's not unheard of for people to write well-written books staring the opposite sex it always surprises me, especially one that deals with a mother-daughter relatsionship at it's heart so well like this one does) has many other works, or at least many other works localized in English but I'd be interested to see what else he's done or even if there are any other translated manhaw gems like this hiding out there that I haven't seen yet.
  

Manhwa Review: Ill-fated Relationship

I was hoping to have this review up last week but my ipod has been a little strange lately* and it took me some time to realize I could only get this app to load when it wasn't connected to the wifi. And I feel bad about this delay since allaboutmanga had asked on twitter if anyone wanted a copy of this app to review (who did the adaption) and I volunteered so again I apologize for the delay.


Ill-Fated Relationship by Hwang Joon Ho

Summary: Two unnamed serial killers meet each other and through their encounters the audience explores their pasts and how they became the people they are.

The Good: When I heard about this story I was told that it was very different from the manhwa that normally gets published in the US which is quite true, I can think of very few manhwa titles that aren't romance first everything else second. Actually, stories about serial killers aren't that common either so it was certainly a different read and a nice change of pace. The pace itself works well (the story is 20 chapters long but they are all fairly short) and the story not only starts in a logical place but it also ends at one (even if it is a bit predictable) and covers all the events in-between that it needs to. It feels like a very complete work without any major flaws.

The Bad: Once the back stories of the characters become clear they become much less interesting characters (partially because, given how the story was going, once everything was explained I knew the end wasn't far off and I just wished it would get there already). Neither of their situations were new ideas or compelling reasons to go out and murder random people, I honestly couldn't help but think that this could have all been prevented and, when you begin to think that there was no reason why the story should have happened, that something else should have happened instead, then you start to like it less. It's a character driven story, there's no doubt about that, but at times the characters just aren't that interesting.

The Visuals/Presentation: The art style is very simple (in full color) but it feels like it was intentionally drawn that way (opposed to the artist not having the skills to draw more complicated artwork). The presentation of the comic itself is very nicely done, each panel fills the whole screen (so there's no need to constantly readjust the page to read the comic) and panels that are too large for this appear to have been planned this way and make nice use of the pan effect. Once the app loads up (there is a short load time for each chapter, only about a minute or less) it's easy to navigate between panels, it's all very smoothly done.


 I'm of two minds about the pricing for this app (again, I got it for free as a review copy but since you have to buy this title I thought it was worth mentioning). Currently the price is $4.99 but regularly it's $8.99 and I'm just not sure if it's worth that. I did a few quick calculations and discovered that this app has as many pages as one and a half or two volumes of a regular paperback which makes the price seem quite good (especially since it's in color) but the fact is that the digital copy of a book needs to be cheaper than the print copy in order to sell (even though cutting out printing costs doesn't cut a lot of the costs I belive, I know it doesn't for regular novels). So, if you're interesting in this app, get it now since I don't know how long that price will last. I think it's an interesting story (I'm actually planning on seeing if a few friends of mine want to borrow my ipod and read it for themselves) but not exactly to my tastes.





*such as not connecting to the internet even when it's logged into the local wi-fi and being convinced it's 1970. I think that second part means that something got reset in the coding so I'm thinking of taking it in soon. TL;DR: this is hardly the first time I've had trouble with my ipod lately so I doubt it's the app's fault that I had trouble loading it sometimes.