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.
