Review copy kindly provided by Yen Press

About the Mangaka

Kara is the name of a manwha-ga-duo: Yoon-Gyeong Kim & Eun-Sook Jeong. And to quote them, their name comes from the Hebrew word for ‘to invite’.

Kim and Jeong first met each other when they both were in their fourth year of university, working together as assistants for the manhwa-ga Eun-Young Hong.
They made their debut in 2000, when their short story “Terra” (which you can find in DD Volume 1) won a prize at the “1st CAKE Manhwa Contest”. On June 15th that year, they began to publish “Mawang Ilgi” in the Manhwa Magazine CAKE.

(copied from Demon Daze)

About the Manga

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I’ve come to the conclusion that manhwa don’t really show their best stuff in black and white. This volume proves my point exactly.

The colour panels in this volume are stunningly beautiful, and the Queen of Hell is breath taking. Yet when we see her again in this volume she’s barely good looking.

That’s not to say that the Kara duo don’t do excellent art, because they do. However when you compare it with manga black and white art, it doesn’t quite live up to them. Where they do beat them hands down though is in the colour panels, they’re less dark, softer and more beautiful than their manga equivalents.

While I understand that it’s impossible to do a series in full colour, this is one that I would have liked to see in colour.

Kara’s art is really good as usual, though I do find myself wishing they’d change one of the characters a bit.

Dong-Young is supposed to be a girl, but I found I had to keep reminding myself of that. Everything about her screams boy, from the way she acts, to the fact she has no breasts.

I’ve nothing against tom-boy characters, I think they can be great characters. However this time it’s a bit disturbing, it’s more like they trying to pass a boy off as a girl.

It’s very frustrating when you’re trying to get into the story when you have to stop, and remind yourself that the person talking is female. They should have at least given her some sort of alteration to show that she was now a girl.

Story wise, I’m enjoying it however. Not really a lot of development in any form, rather it’s just plodding along slowly. That said, I do wonder how they can finish this properly in only one more volume, unless this is another of those that needs to be re-licensed (which I’m hoping).

I’d love to say Yen did a splendid job on this, but I can’t. For the first time I’ve found mistakes in a Yen Press title. There was only four of them true, but they’re pretty obvious which makes me wonder why they weren’t picked up on by the QCer’s. Oddly all of them revolve around the ‘I’ use. ‘I’d’ being used instead of ‘I’ve’ for example.

It’s not bad enough to spoil the flow, but if I am surprised to find them in there. Yen usually do an excellent job with their checking.

This volume also lacks one other thing, it lacks a guttering problem. While the panels do go all the way into the spine of the book, I didn’t find a reason to bend the book to gain an understanding. This is a huge plus in my book.

However, can I recommend this, and keep it on my Essential Read list? In short, no. While I like the series, there are to many things against it to justify it being on the list. One of the main aspects being whether it’ll be re-licensed by Yen Press or not, and if so how long it takes them.

Where to Buy

Officially this isn’t released until the 28th October 2008, but Amazon and a few other places already have them in stock….or so they claim lol

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