Many thanks to Yen Press for providing a review copy

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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Things really start to pick up on this volume, with several of the main characters finally getting their introductions.

This volume really took me by surprise, there’s plenty of stuff revealed in this volume that makes up for the slowness of the previous volumes.

KARA’s art is stunning in this volume, starting with the color pages at the front and carrying on throughout. I especially loved the chibi Yoo, who is just to damned cute to be legal!!

I did however notice something else about KARA’s art, it’s very wispy. In this volume especially the changes between the hard and sharp art, to the wispy and airy art style is to blatant, and I don’t think it works well.

Mixing the two art styles has to be done with care to really pull it off, but KARA can’t quite do it in this series. This is a shame since it would have been all the better.

I really like the cover art of this volume, it has a cute aspect to it that mutes the darker story inside. This is one of the good traits of KARA’s art style I’ve come to notice. This is an interesting aspect, and one that’s needed. Without KARA’s softy art, the story would most likely be a bit overwhelming. Darkness is all well and good, but it shouldn’t be over used.

Story wise I was hooked throughout this volume. Several of the major players are introduced, and a lot of back story is finally revealed. The other good thing about this series is there’s no clear bad guy or good guys. Since both of the main sides seem to be as bad as the other. It’s really refreshing to read series like this where you’re not really sure what’s going on from the out set.

Several new characters are set up in this volume as well, one of them is introduced, and I was a bit surprised by who it was, and the other isn’t named. But she looks just as cute as chibi Yoo :)

While a lot of this volume is done through flash backs, it’s a good volume since it ties up a lot of questions that I had about the relationships between characters. I’m now looking forward to the future volumes.

Yen return with their usual great work on this release. The only thing I’m not so sure about is the use of SFX’s. While they leave them un-translated (Thumbs up there) they add the english version almost right over it. This looks really bad at times, I would have preferred they add them in <—> around the sides of the panels or something, it would have looked better.

This volume has very little in the way of guttering which is great. Only the usual ones you’d expect from manhwa.

Sadly though, while I loved the volume, it’s still not quite good enough to make my essential read list. I’m hoping that the future volumes improve to the point where I can add it

Where to Buy

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