Books 30-32
The Restorer's Home Omnibus Volume 1 by Kim Sang-yeop
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This manhwa relies heavily on some common tropes a) the lone teen with zero parental support b) magical objects. In this case Sung-Woo's parents divorced. Mom left first and then dad and Sung-Woo is trying to avoid his father's debt holders and having enough money to keep the lights on and eat in his grandfather's historical house. Dad seems to have been an archaeologist (maybe, not even his son is sure) and along with loansharks, a girl named Ran comes for Sung-Woo. She serves the king Jungpyeong-Gun and needs Sung-Woo's help. He thinks she's a cosplayer putting him on (since that King would have been from centuries before).
Sung-Woo has a secret. He sees the 'souls' attached to handmade objects and feels compelled to keep them healthy/happy. This is how he gets into restoring things. Also his psychic abilities run to seeing an object's history.
So this weighty omnibus is a collection of short stories where he begins restoring things with several through plots like Ran, what's going on with his Dad, will he have money to live and there is another stranger in his life who is his entry to professional restoration but also has his own agenda.
It's cute. Sung-Woo is sweet. I'm not sure I'd run out and buy it but I'm glad the library has it. The art is very nice
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Carmilla: The First Vampire by Amy Chu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
3.5 read. I wanted to rate it higher but it felt a little rushed but that could be entirely down to what Dark Horse contracted for as a comic book and more importantly the main character makes so many dumb choices I wanted her Yeh Yeh to slap her into next week.
It's the mid 90s (just a couple years after I was working in the city) in NYC, the year of the Rat and Athena is a social worker being swamped by homelessness, drugs, the AIDS epidemic and kids being tossed out for being gay. (I feel her, I really do, having been there working with those problems). Several young women end up dead and she doesn't feel like the police care.
She looks into it because one of the murdered girls was her client, tracking her to a club called Carmilla. There she meets both Violet, the young girl working the coat check, and Mai Tai, the transwoman working the bar. The night gets weird and Athena ends up at her Yeh Yeh's (grandfather). He raised her and now teaches tai chi in the park.
Athena isn't appropriately alarmed when Violet shows up at her and her live-in girlfriend, Morgan's home and invites her in (something she might have done in the past) and here is where the story loses points for me. It starts running on far too predictable rails. The red flags were the size of circus tents but Athena doesn't see them. Morgan does. Yeh Yeh does. Athena listens to no one.
It ends about how you'd imagine it will. Still, overall the story is good as is the art. It's nice to see the legend of Carmilla still getting some love. I did like the twist Yeh Yeh tossed in there. I would have liked even more Asian folklore as it's applied with a light brush. This does set up for a sequel. I wouldn't say no to that.
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Onibi: Diary of a Yokai Ghost Hunter by Atelier Sentô
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This graphic novel had some very weird artistic choices. It centers on two young visitors from France (the blurb says they're Cecile and Olivier but I don't think they're named in the book and those are the names of the creators) Artistic choice one: what age they? they look 12 but I suspect older. Artistic weird choice two: they have no noses. Seriously every other character has a nose but these two are forever noseless.
The young girl gets scammed into a plastic child's toy of a camera that uses expensive film but in theory can photograph yokai, spirits in Japanese lore. So their whole trip becomes about taking yokai photographs which they never seem to see in real time but each story ends with a diary entry and a photoshopped photo with yokai in them. That was the cleverest part of all of this.
The stories weren't bad just not memorable. THey are shallow. It would have been nicer perhaps if they had done less stories and gave everyone more depth.
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