Category: Books

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Book (Manhwa): I’m the Queen In This Life by Themis

Cover art for I'm the Queen In This Life by Themis

I’m the Queen In This Life
by Themis, Omin
published by Webtoon (106 episodes, ongoing)
2022 – present

Ariadne desperately loves Cesare, and will do anything to win his approval and become his wife – including regicide. She is also willing to wait, and wait, and wait for their engagement to lead to an actual wedding after her dirty deeds open the throne to him. Cesare and her half sister betray her, however, and as she lay dying, she asks for another chance at life… She is offered one more chance – WITH CONDITIONS.

Ariadne wakes up in her distant past as her desperate, 17-year old self, living on a farm in isolation from her powerful Cardinal father. She knows her father is going to send for her and pass her off to Cesare, which she can’t allow to happen. She also knows she can’t just live a normal life: this time around, she has to make up for the evil deeds she did last time.

So much is asked of second-chance heroines, and Ariadne gets this treatment at an unusual level. She has to be multilingual, pious, must bravely confront a heretic pastor in the national cathedral, prevent an assassination, survive her conniving and evil family, impress her highly political father, and NOT under ANY circumstance, wind up being handed off to Cesare like property. Oh, and be NICE, which isn’t something she had much practice in within her predatory surroundings.

Her efforts don’t always work out – she is actively being sabotaged by her stepmother, her stepsisters, jealous servants, Cesare, local gossips, and even assassins from a neighboring kingdom! People die on her. Plots succeed against her. Rumors swirl because of an issue with the color of her dress as a masquerade… Her new love is pledged to marry someone else. But she wearily fights on.

I can tell you that the title of this comic doesn’t seem like it will become true anytime soon 100 episodes on! But there is hope, and she’s going to keep fighting. (I want to buy this girl a drink and give her a hug.). There’s still a possibility it won’t literally happen, but she’s been through so much personal growth that she deserves a crown.

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Book: Lore Olympus: Volume One by Rachel Smythe

Cover of Lore Olympus Volume One by Rachel Smythe

Lore Olympus: Volume One
by Rachel Smythe
published by Del Ray / Penguin Random House
2021

I’m big into Webtoon (my credit card company can confirm this!), and was curious about this first book in a series when I spotted it at Silver Sprocket. There is something about the use of color in the art that I found novel, so I picked it up. And I enjoyed it!

This is a retelling of the story of Persephone and Hades, with cell phones, parties, credit cards, shopping gossip, and saturated color.

The saturated, extures, shadows, and the GLOW that things have are all appealing elements of Smythe’s style.

My taste in Webtoon comics leans toward overly rendered buildings drawn in perspective with excessive arched arcades, plus costumes with entirely too many fasteners (many of which cannot fasten things based on their position). But this softer approach of running-mascara facial expressions and six-line faces in glowing rooms charmed me.

I have mixed feelings that the gods of Olympus have cell phones, cars, and modernist houses to bring the story into our age, but those details do nothing to diminish the drama of jealous gods, personal insecurity, crushes, sibling rivalries, love, beauty, endless night, and apology donuts.

I fear I may fall for the next six massive volumes of this series, but I’m trying to get to the bottom of this particular reading pile before I consider the temptation.

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Reading: A Note About Digital Manhwa

I know I write often of comics, manga, and manhwa, but I wanted to make a fuss about how digital illustration has really changed how comics look now, and has made manhwa (comics from South Korea) in particular so attractive to me as a person who used to work in architecture.

I previously wrote about A Not So Fairy Tale by Hyobin on Webtoon. Look at this scene:

Just a scene of one character waiting in a restaurant for another character to show up. (She won’t.)

Look at the details. The textures. The shadows that the evening sun makes on the floor (which has a sort of wood parquet treatment). This level of effort in webtoons is VERY appealing to me. And is spoiling me a bit.

Even if/when the characters are highly stylized in unnatural ways, the rendering of the world they live in – backgrounds, the interior design, the furniture, the foliage – these have some remarkable details. Some appear to be produced by specialists who just create castles, modern cities, European rococo ballrooms, etc. Others appear to be photo-to-illustration conversions of some sort (but that works only for places based on real settings).

Drawings produced at this level when I was still in architecture would have been award-winning marvels of the profession: now they are the routine product of manhwa studio artists!

I admire the effort (and artifice) that goes into producing these scenes.

I have other favorite scenes to express my admiration for, but I haven’t reviewed those particular manga yet, so they’ll likely turn up in a few weeks.

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Book (Manhwa): Monster Duke’s Daughter by Han Ocean, Chal Lan

Art for Monster Duke's Daughter by Han Ocean, Chal Lan
Wholesome father-daughter scene

Monster Duke’s Daughter
by Han Ocean, Chal Lan
published by Webtoon (151 chapters, ongoing)
2022 – present

Tiny Lotilucia is transported away from her beloved mother, who was still trapped in their eternally snowy forest home/prison, to the estate of her unknown father, Duke Frodium. She knows her mother said a forever goodbye, and she knows that her father factually accepts her existence, but isn’t entirely sure how to relate to her.

As she tries to maintain a low profile (out of sight, out of danger?) and learns to read, she finds a book in the library. A book about a little girl named Lotilucia, whose father is also Duke Frodium, and who… dies very young, without every being fully accepted by her father. In the story, she is replaced in her father’s improved affections by a new adopted daughter, who appears to be the true heroine of the book, and who resembles Lotilucia’s lost mother. Despite being a tiny-but-literate girl, she decides that she won’t allow the book to determine her fate, and strikes out to really live – this includes forging a bond with her surprised father, preventing her untimely death, and perhaps becoming the lead character of her own story.

As she grows, she realizes she can do more than just survive – she may be able to protect her father’s secret (he’s a demon protecting the human world from the demon world), use rare powers she inherited from her mother to protect her loved ones – including her friends, one of who is growing up into a handsome boy, and is secretly a dragon – and become a protector of the human world and ally to the emperor as her father’s successor.

There are sci-fi technologies in this fantasy story, questions about whether Lotilucia is living in a real world or if the book was the real world, and scenes that were supposed to be flashbacks, but where the participants (or at least one important participant) can see Lotilucia and interact with her in what should just be a memory…

Our child heroine really has too much on her shoulders, and has to exceed the abilities and expectations of other so much, it’s unfair! Despite her young start, she is SO DETERMINED and so unnaturally skilled, that she is pulling off improbable rescues and stirring up trouble much larger than herself. The giant-eyed child does grow up over the course of the story, so her body catches up (mostly) with her enormous eyes.

I’m 151 chapters in, and the fact that I’m 151 chapters in tells you that I’m committed! This is a cute fantasy story about being true to yourself, thinking you are old enough to make independent decisions when you are four years old (you are not), making your own future, caring about your parents, worrying your father, and having everyone say you make a good-looking couple with your dragon guy pal.

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Book: Heat by Jean Wei

Heat
by Jean Wei
published by Peow Books (Jean Wei)
2023

This is a COMPLETELY ADORABLE comic about a fire demon who wakes up on a farm and is adopted by the farm family as seasonal help and a friend.

Auntie Ann and Katy don’t think twice about taking Red in, taking Red to a friend to make some soft clothes suitable for an eight foot tall fire demon. They just… accept Red as they are: a nice, helpful, large, warm being.

Have I mentioned this is completely adorable?

Cats can’t resist Red, a cosy fire demon who is always warm. Awwwwwwwww. Beyond cute!

I can often resist things that are cute, but this is so…. not just cute, but soothing. Sweet. Homey. Gentle.

We could all use some sweetness.

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Book: Creepy Cat Volume 1 by Cotton Valent

Creepy Cat volume 1
by Cotton Valent
published by Star Seas Company and Kodansha
2019

Cover art for Creepy Cat Volume 1 by Cotton Valent

This is an adorable, gothic visual comic collection about a lovely goth girl named Flora who inherits a mansion inhabited by a “cat.”

This”cat” defies the laws of physics, consumes people, levitates, stretches endlessly into room-filling forms, periodically swallows Flora…

Creepy Cat is both adorable and… a monster of some undetermined kind. But it is so… fluffy! (Life lesson: you can get away with a lot if you are fluffy.)

The stories are brief, a few panels or pages long, and are stylishly adorable. The tone is great; Flora is charming; Creepy Cat lives up to its name. Flora is sometimes in danger, and it appears Creepy Cat may periodically eat or harm Flora, but doesn’t necessarily like when anyone else does that. (Yay for possessiveness?)

There is an adorable brief comic at the end in which Valent tells the story of how this comic came to be.

This is a lovely, consistent, stylish, attractive work. And there are more volumes out there, which is good news.

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Book (Manga): The Summer Hikaru Died by Mokumokuren

English language cover of The Summer Hikaru Died by Mokumokuren

The Summer Hikaru Died volume 1
by Mokumokuren
published in English by Yen Press
2023

Hikaru went missing in the mountains. And then… Hikaru came back.

But the Hikaru that came back is not the same lifelong friend that Yoshiki has always had at his side. This Hikaru admits that he is… something else, something that has never been human before. It has Hikaru’s memories, but is feeling everything in Hikaru’s body for the first time. And in a moment of stress, he/it loses some of Hikaru’s form, and Yoshiki can see things he should not be able to see.

But Yoshiki has missed his dear friend so badly, that maybe this other Hikaru is enough. Maybe.

The cicadas chirps fill the air, the summer heat makes the boys sweat on their walks to school, and Yoshiki gets warnings that something dark is taking over the town, from others who have seen the forms the darkness can take…

This is broad-daylight-spooky. I can’t wait to read the next two volumes!

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Life / Reading Notes of the moment

  • The comics I await most eagerly are:
  • While weekly serialization feels brutal on the artists’ side for being too fast for them to produce the work, this pace remains slow for readers. It is jarring to open a chapter in a middle of a conversation when I can’t remember who was even involved… I’m definitely going to have to re-read many of these to write about them once they are complete. Or delay reading them until I can do so in larger sets of chapters.
  • Most of my comics are about women, and that’s because I’m picking those out of the adventure, drama, and romance sections because action heroines are fun (I’ve had decades of male-centered stories!) and prefer their art.
    • There is more gender balance in the women-led stories – so many male characters all around in various roles (not just as romantic leads, but also as allies, fans, supported, fathers, villains…) where the reverse isn’t always true for the man-led ones.
    • There are more elaborate artsy details in most of the stories I choose. I skim lots of types of comics, and reject many of the heroine stories if the art doesn’t call me (or if they are beautifully drawn but ramble about strategic agriculture!), but I have this problem more frequently with the action hero stories. Those are generally illustrated much more simply, and I’m less interested in those art styles.
  • The ‘boys love’ comics I’ve chosen combine drama and adventure successfully with romance elements. (Love IS love!) As I was telling a friend about them, everyone is remarkably good-looking, plus, there is sex, drama, and adventure – what’s not to love?

Reading current Korean comics has become a proper hobby. And I get excited when I see other people reading comics from the same publisher on the train, but am hold myself back from asking for their recommendations… for now.

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Book (Manhwa): Winter Wolf by soonmu, cheong yong, rubyche

Cover art for Winter Wolf by soonmu, cheong yong, rubyche

Winter Wolf
by soonmu, cheong yong, rubyche
published by Tappytoon (2 seasons; 61 chapters, complete)
Undated

I’ve read the first season (through chapter 36) of this spooky mansion romance. Because, as a former redhead, I feel obligated to read manhwa about other redheads. (You know, for the cartoon sisterhood.)

The revolution arrived, and Lysithea is on the losing side. Her family members and others in the nobility have been executed or will be once they are found. She is paying smugglers to get her out of the country by sea, so she can live abroad with a foreign aunt. But while she is exhausted from being in hiding and on the run, her horse takes off, and she finds herself traveling on foot through the snow to an abandoned mansion, where her next ‘broker’ (smugglers are fussy about their professional nicknames) awaits her.

Her broker is expecting her, but her next step required the horse she just lost, plus getting to port before the ice does. Also, the abandoned mansion they are sheltering in has a reputation for being haunted. Her broker insists that the moaning and cries for help she hears at night are just her imagination. As her lack of sleep wears down her sanity, she fears she may need an escape from her own escape plans…

This story has classic horror movie tropes delivered well, and a heroine who is both brave enough to investigate things that go bump in the night and exhausted enough to periodically choose to just stay in bed and pretend not to hear the moaning – I respect her deeply for BOTH of these attitudes. There are very few characters in the story, and they are all suspicious! There is plenty of suspense at the end of the first season. (The fact that there are two seasons is something of a spoiler, I suppose. But: you’ll live.)

Season 1 of Winter Wolf is enjoyable.

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