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
This is another of Yen Press’ relicenses from Ice Kunion. which means it’s been over six months since the last volume was released. Like Legend it suffers badly from the time gap, though not as bad as Legend did.
It took me a while to get back into the flow of the story with this volume, and truthfully my initial thoughts were not so good. However as the volume progressed I got more and more settled, and more and more into it.
Art wise, it’s stunning again this volume. The colour panels are just awesome. The first one is the cover without title and other text on it, and it looks amazing. Though looking at it Se-In reminds of a certain character from a certain CLAMP series 
The next two are cute, but aren’t as good as the first one IMO.
I like the art in the volume, though it lacks something, it doesn’t feel as good as it was in the previous volume. I still wish that Dong-Young, the princess, was more feminine. Everything she does is pure boy. Okay yeah she’s a tom boy, but there are limits to what should be done.
I do love the way KARA draws their characters, though I can’t help but seem similarities between theirs and CLAMP’s character designs. Some of the characters are eerily similar to characters in both XXXHolic and Tsubasa, both of which I recently reread.
Story wise, we don’t get a lot, though it’s lack of story is bolstered by some killer action scenes. The fight is a bit short lived for my liking, but some of the best art happens in the fight so it’s a good balance.
I am looking forward to seeing how the ending, which is another cliff-hanger, carries on into the next volume.
However I still haven’t found an answer to the question I asked last volume, Why is this called Angel Diary? Even in this volume it’s more focused on the demon element.
Sadly I do have a complaint to Yen Press this time, and I’m hoping this is simply a problem with the review copies. However this volume suffers from faded art. There’s four or five pages where the art is more grey, like the printing press was running out of ink or something when it was printing.
Other than that I give them full marks for the usual excellent job all round. A good flow to the script, and no guttering. I did however find the effects to be overly large. English translations for these should be small and unobtrusive. Having both the original Korean and english together really clutters the panels at times.
Though I’m still not sure if I’ll add it on my Essential Read list, while I’m enjoying the series, it’s not really Essential sadly.
Where to Buy
August 4, 2009 @ 15:14.
Reading v09 made me realize that what I love best about Angel Diary is the interaction between Dong-Young and Bi-wal. The other characters are interesting in their way. But none top the fun I get out of seeing the princess of Heaven and the King of Hell together. Why did I realize this in v09? Because there wasn’t enough of them together. The story of the injured demon was nice to know. I happen to like him and hope for the best for him. But Angel Diary is just not the same without Dong-Young and Bi-wal poking at each other.
About the series name, I think it had more to do with marketing than anything else. I think The Powers That Be wanted a title that reminded potential buyers of Kara’s first work, Demon Diary. Officially, the two works exist in the same universe although they have nothing in common storywise. Quite honestly, I think that’s all there is to the why of the title. I see it as a way to pull in readers from Demon Diary by offering a title of a similar name.