Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Pandora Hearts -- An Adventure in Manga

Pandora Hearts, Vol. 1Pandora Hearts, Vol. 1 by Jun Mochizuki.  This is my first Manga, and while I wasn't urged to read this book specifically, I have a friend out there (helloo Frannie!) who is also new to Manga and totally into it.  But I am sure glad I only got the one volume without being greedy like usual, because I don't expect to be reading any more Mangas in the near future.  It's just not my thing.  The storyline was promising as anything - who doesn't like Alice in Wonderland?  Fish out of water?  Japanese art?  Who never read comics as a kid?  I loved my Marvel Barbie comics, myself.  There was a real special one where Barbie goes to the pyramids of Egypt, that I think my brother screwed up somehow and my dad had to iron the covers out.  A precious gem, that!

Pandora Hearts, not so precious.  I couldn't follow the story, and even less the characters -- I get that one has black hair and the other some kind of white-blonde (the graphics are of course black-and-white), but then all of a sudden, there's another black-haired character!  And then another white-haired character!  And for some reason they all seemed to be wearing old-timey European clothes -- I'm not smart on the actual fashions of "ancient Japanese styles" but I was expecting something at least remotely foreign-seeming, and that's kinda what drew me to the Mangas.  Instead I got a slip-shod story with some all-right-I-guess-it's-good? artwork (not familiar with degrees of good-ness, sorry), and characters that were actually pretty annoying where they were actually decipherable in the mess.  I guess the author liked Carroll's Alice and punched out a couple strange, senseless turns of events and voila.  Maybe I'm not indie enough or something.  Thoughts? Anyone want to hit me over the head with Paradise Kiss, perhaps?

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