Review copy kindly provided by Yen Press

About the Mangaka

Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything on KwangHyun Seo, who wrote the story, nor on JinHo Ko who did the art. If anyone has any info please drop me a line through the contact me page.

About the Manga

I’m not sure if I like this series or not to be honest. There are a number of problems I noticed in reading that soured the enjoyment a bit.

JinHo’s art goes in swings and round about’s, one point it’s great and the next it’s rough. Though I have to admit that it does grow on me. However the true saving grace of this manhwa is JinHo’s story, it’s awesome.

I’ve read a lot of manga over the years, and this is a new twist, something refreshingly different. Yes it has elements from already established genre, but it handles them differently.

The story follows Da-Il as he starts as an assistant to and manhwa-ga (same as mangaka, only the Korean version ). One small problem, he sucks at drawing, though he has the drive and passion needed and starts to learn the ropes.

However it’s not long before he finds destiny has something else in store for him, namely he’s going to be getting rid of the ghosts created by left over emotions, as a Croquer, He has the innate ability to draw the left over emotions and bring them to life as a ghost. His partner, Mu-Huk is also a ghost, who does the whopping  after Da-Il has created them.

It’s hard to judge a series based off of a single volume, but like a few others I’ve reviewed recently this one has the potential to be something good.

This is being released by Yen Press, and once again the quality is pretty awesome. The paper isn’t upto With the Light, or Spiral’s standard, but it’s still higher quality than is usually seen in manga. And is at least white paper.

However, it has a serious flaw, it suffers from severe gutter problems, or rather it has no gutter at all. All to often I was having to bend the book back further than I liked, and on a few occasions it was almost folded back on itself. While I can understand why this is happening, it’s not something I like doing as it damages the book and ultimately cuts in on the books life.

However one thing I do like about Yen is that they leave the colour pages intact. All to often publishers remove the colour pages so as to cut down on costs, Yen don’t. As a result we’re treated to four pages of full colour goodness, and those four pages make up for the gutter problems IMO ’cause they’re awesome!!

As always with Yen’s translations there were no discernable errors, the story flowed seamlessly from one chapter to the next.

While I can’t add this to my Essential Read list, I will be following it and make a judgement on it after a few more volumes. To many times I’ve seen series with potential not fulfil it, or begin to only to fall short. I’m looking forward to seeing which this one will be.

Where to Buy

This is not released until the 11th June 2008. When it is released you can buy it as always from the Book Depository, Or you can support Yen Press in their UK releases by buying it from Waterstones who get their stock from the official UK supplier’