Many thanks to Yen Press for providing a review copy

About the Mangaka

YU Yanshu is one of the main artists of the SUMMER studio in Beijing, with over thirty published works spanning various styles and genre.

About the Manga

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I’m trying my best to find something constructive to compliment on the release, but I honestly can’t find anything. Or perhaps, it has a decent cover.

I can’t believe something like this was licensed, since to be honest I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as bad. I’d rather force myself to read Tokyopop’s Psychic Academy!!

After reading other Chinese stuff, especially the recently released An Ideal World, I had high expectations for this volume. When I picked it up and saw the cover I was all the more interested as well.

The story that’s opened in the synopsis also piqued my interest, but then I’ve always loved vampire stories.

Sadly when I opened the volume my hoped went from shattered to dust, and by the end of the volume my eyes were bleeding it was that bad.

YU may have over thirty titles already, but if they’re all done like this then I wonder who bought all of them.

The impression I got while reading this was of those crappy OEL’s that have been going around, you know the ones doing the Shakespeare plays and bible. In fact in a lot of ways the art is a hell of a lot worse, I’ve seen kids drawing better.

YU can’t seem to settle on character designs very well. Throughout the volume I noticed some subtle, and some not so subtle changes to the characters. This is very frustrating, and IMO highly unprofessional. Especially for someone claiming to be an experienced professional.

His choice of colouring is rather bad as well (oops, forgot to mention this a colour manhua). At times his choice seems to be okay, but at others, because of the way he draws, it just looks plain old naf.

I could forgive the art, and tolerate it if the story made up for it, sadly it fails in a big way. This surprised me, since it’s a vampire story it wouldn’t have had to even try hard to impress me. Unfortunately the story is just as bad as the art, or even worse if you can believe it.

The main issue with the story is it’s fragmented, it’s introduced, dropped, hinted at and dropped again. Given this is a two volume series (going by Yen’s website) he really needed to lay some ground work in this volume, which he didn’t.

I suppose you could say he did lay some ground work, since he does cover the main points of the story, but to me it’s to disjointed and weak. This is a shame, since from what I saw of the story it had potential to be an interesting story.

Sadly, for the first time I feel let down by Yen Press as well. The issue on their side is the choice of fonts. There are a lot of speech bubbles that are a light colour (hard to say if it’s a light pink or cream). For some reason they chose to use a white font in these, which makes it very very hard to read what’s there, ruining the flow.

*sigh* over all I was severely disappointed with this release, and have to say it goes on my Junk Pile.

Where to Buy

Note: This series doesn’t ship until April 21st 2009

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