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
This volume has so much stuff going on in it feels a bit crowded and rushed, but it was a fairly good volume.
If I’m honest, I hate the cover for this volume. Something about it just feels totally crap, can’t put my finger on it though. The double page colour pull out is equally lacking, which I found surprising, as usually the colour pages are awesome.
Although the art in this volume is generally the wispy style I’m not to keen on, it also has a stronger sharper style to it which offsets the wispy style really well.
I really liked the character design for Seo-Hee, No-Ah’s sister. What I really loved though was the comparison we get of her as a child, where she’s rather cute (and actually reminds me of Angel from Maximum Ride), and her as an adult as she is now. While she still has that cute aspect, it’s been lost for a harder beauty. The two aspects work really well IMO.
Hong-Dong also goes through a rather odd change and comes back as a rival for No-Ah, who seems to have trouble choosing between three girls.
The way the story played out here was over-board wit to much information dumped all at once. To many revelations about the blade, and about Eun-Gyo, which means the impact of some of these revelations are lost.
The truth about Eun should have been one of the biggest elements of the volume, but it was suffocated by the other revelations.
By the end of the volume my already flagging interest in the series has hit an all time low. Scarily, most of the revelations that had been revealed in this volume I’d already sort of guessed as they’d become pretty obvious. Only one came as a surprise, which was what saved the volume for me.
As always I can’t fault Yen’s handling of the series, the translation flows well and consistently. The only thing I wasn’t keen on was the large english SFX’s next to the original Korean. Either one or the other, cant have both together it looks cramped at times. I’d of preferred a smaller simple english translation next to the SFX like they used to do.
Sadly this is another series that will not make my Essential Read list, it lacks to much for that. It’s also to transparent, within the first few volumes it’s easy to figure out how it’s going to end, which is something I hate. That said, it is one of those series I’d recommend picking up as a light nonchalant read when you simply want a time killer.
Where to Buy
