Many thanks to Yen Press for the review copy of this volume

About the Mangaka

Sadly nothing available on either Yi DongEun, who does the story, or Yu Chung the artist. Sorry folks, Korean mangaka don’t seem to get the love their Japanese counterparts do.

About the Manga

I have to admit this series was totally beneath my radar. I’d never even heard of it until the review copy turned up on my doorstep.

The full series title is FREAK: Legend of the Nonblonds, and it’s one of the titles picked up by Yen when IceK merged with them. As a series I’d never heard of before, I haven’t read the first two volumes, so this post is based solely on this volume. However I have ordered volumes one and two and when I’ve had a chance to read them I’ll probably do an update.

That said, from this volume alone I think this series rocks!! The art is a bit weird at times, but it’s in the style I’ve come to expect from Korean titles.

On the whole Yu Chung is a good artist, and is certainly one of the better Korean ones I’ve seen of late, though he does have a slight problem with hands. Something I’ve noticed most mangaka, wether Korean, Japanese or Chinese seem to have, to varying degrees. Yu’s is the proportions are a bit off, and all of his hands tend to look like a guys hands, even on the girls.

The comedy scenes interjected in the later half of the volume had me in hysterics, the story built up to a huge peak, you think all hell is about to ensue, turn the page and your hit with a comedy scene. These are omake’s after the chapter ends, but they meld into the chapter really well. However it’s easy to tell them apart, as the omake isn’t as well drawn, or as clean and crisp as the rest.

Yi DongEun’s story is interesting, though the lack of not reading the previous two volumes may have hampered my understanding of certain things. Mostly though the story flows well and is enjoyable.

The plot is a little fuzzy, and I’ll look at it again when I get my first two volumes delivered. However it looks to focus around Tublerun, who holds some dark secret, that occasionally breaks out and causes mayhem. I’ll do a more in depth look at the plot again when I get my other two volumes.

Yen did their usual good job on the quality wise, though the paper seems to be of a slightly lower level, quality wise. I’ve noticed this in their recent releases, the paper is slowly heading towards the quality we get from the likes of Tokyopop and Viz. I miss the the high quality releases of With the Light, and the first Spiral volume.

This volume also has a gutter problem, on both sides of the book. The run in to the binding isn’t to bad, but the cut off on the page rim is a bit bad at times, cutting words off half way, as well as the images themselves.

The other thing that was a bit annoying was the font changes on bubbles that were close to the edge. The last few panels of page 10 are a prime example of this. We have a huge bubble with only a few words, but for some reason they shrunk the font size which makes it hard to read at times. As a result we have titchy lettering and a huge amount of unused white space.

Considering the guttering problem it has with cutting words off, it makes me wonder what was the point of it? I mean the times they should have shrunk the fonts they didn’t, and as as a result they were cut off, yet at times there was no need to shrink them, they did.

Translation wise I didn’t spot anything wrong. Though since I’ve not read the original I can’t say for sure. However I’ve found Yen to be great when it comes to translation.

The other good thing about Yen’s release is the cost, the original volumes ran for around the £7.50-7.99 mark depending where you bought them. Yen’s however are at their usual price of £5.99.

I’m adding this to my Essential Read list, since i found this volume awesome, despite my few niggles.

As soon as I get my hands on volumes one and two I’ll do a post on them, and update this one.

Where to Buy

As always with Yen Press releases, you can support them by buying from Waterstones. However the Book Depository will also have it available when it’s released at the end of the month.

Official release date: 26/6/2008