Probably this is my favorite manwha so far, except for Island (by the same creators). I would like to read more manwha, but when I looked last at what they were translating commercially, a lot of it was… uh, probably licensed quite cheaply.
Anyway, Shin Angyo Onshi, although created by two Koreans, was also serialized in translation in Japan during its run, and this means that there are notes by the author to Japanese readers explaining the folklore references. The story concerns Munsu, a traveling angyo onshi (an official who wanders around the country investigating other officials. As is noted in the manwha itself, like Mito Komon), who is seeking a man known as Aji Tae, the destroyer of the nation of Jushin. Jushin resembles a fantasy ancient Korea, although maybe it would be more accurate to say it’s more of an RPG fantasy world, with summoners and firearms, and stylishly anachronistic garments. Many of the adventures that Munsu has are based off of Korean folktales (although in a highly unorthodox way). I wished I had known more than just the legend of Chun Hyang, though. I should note that also, although the story at first seems to be half serious, half light-hearted, it eventually is pretty… grim, actually. Munsu is not the shounen hero as kid-who-is-cipher-for-reader, but a man with a past, a la Kenshin (tragic lost love) or Guts (loses everything through betrayal). And in storyline set in the present, there is a lot of “rocks fall, everyone dies.” The art is extremely pretty at times, and there are a lot of biseinen and bishoujo, for those of you who like that kind of thing. Although, I couldn’t help but laugh at the extreme skimpiness of Sando’s outfit. XD
With a lot of manga, I feel that the storyline is bloated and goes FAR much longer than the premise warrants, or the amount of cast members becomes ridiculously large in an attempt to get a moe character for every possible demographic reading, but with Shin Angyo Onshi, as in Amatsuki, I actually felt the opposite, that the story went too quickly. SAO is seventeen volumes, but I think it could have just as well gone up to thirty. There were lots of characters I wanted to find out more about, and sometimes the storytelling felt a bit too much like “telling, not showing.” On the whole, though, worth reading.
June 11, 2008 at 10:25 pm
shin angyo onshi is frickin’ AWESOME.
have not read island but am looking to do so at the soonest opportunity.
unrelated, glass mask <3 due to time constraints i’m taking it one volume at a time, but mannn. such an inspiring title!
June 16, 2008 at 11:16 am
Yeah, Island is pretty good, though it takes a weird turn and ends up going from a story about weird events on Jeju island and shamanism to a story about Korean-Japanese relations.
It indeed is!
June 18, 2008 at 5:17 am
Yay! Lovely to know you enjoyed the series — too many unanswered questions about characters, fully agreed. I’m curious to know who your favourite characters were though, and which ones you wanted to know more about. For me, more about Miss Huang (or was it Hwang? can no longer keep it straight) and her Sando would have been good. I was actually curious how Mo Su also ended up where he was — gosh, what a way to totally hollow out the Jushin king as a character.
Mine are the popular choice, I guess — Munsu! of course, Sando, Won Su, Bang Ja and naturally Won Sul. And his incredibly sucky life and zombiehood.
June 18, 2008 at 5:22 am
I actually liked all the characters. Definitely, Miss Huang needed more characterization. Munsu and Won Sul, were IMHO (I guess Aji Tae?) were some of the few who got enough.
I also would have liked more stuff about the Jushin King and how he actually you know, became king.
Sando is IMHO kind of an underdeveloped character. She’s eye candy and has a lot of good fighting scenes… but otherwise? Some of it is explained by the revelation that she is not a human being, but actually an ascended animal, or something like that.
Aji Tae: So, Munso, you see Sando as a woman?
Munsu: Kind of hard not to, with how she’s falling out of her non-clothes like that.
Aji Tae: LOL FURVERT!
I felt that by the end, Aji Tae was kinda like… Sauron, just this total incarnation of evil, and not that interesting, because his motivations were essentially a-human. The manwha is in a way like Berserk, except it just goes from the in media res part and has only cut scenes and the climax from the past arc.
June 25, 2008 at 10:47 am
Completely lost interest in Ajitae by the time he’d gathered all his evil allies. I actually was misled by his presentation of good and evil simply being two sides of the same coin et cetera — it seemed at first he had a definite philosophy or something and I admit I would have liked him more if he turned out to be a leader of a cult or possibly a demon aiming for godhood. It could have been fun if he went around turning animals into people and vice versa. Instead his true colours are: Purge Earth of all humans, a rallying cry of villains since goodness knows when. I very nearly wanted my money back.
Also, that convo between Mun Su and Aji Tae – WIN. XD XD XD Though I think I was convinced that girl could not be human if she was only wearing tiny leather straps and a tatty cloak in winter.
I suspect they just wanted to get it over and done with by now; had it been a shonen jump mangaka, the battle between the zombie first king of Jushin alone would have probably been spun out an entire volume with the appropriate powerup, and the match-offs lavished with loving detail instead of the Aji Tae waves his pinky finger and blows up half the army and Ms Huang. I actually feel slightly cheated now that I’m not so blinded with indignation over how many people they killed at the end.
Though I actually miss the earlier stories, like the tiger one which I found unexpectedly sweet, or even the modified chun hyang story. I do wonder if they thought, like a fairytale, all Sando really needed was to beautiful, rather than have a past.
June 27, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Yeah, at first it was kind of interesting. His ideas did seem sort of like bastardizedly Sartrean, but then it just got kind of boring because to do philosophy really well it has to be less personal.
I was TOTALLY thinking that too. Like “oh please oh please, she cannot be wearing that.”
Yeah… In a way, it’s good that it’s seinen. But in shounen they probably wouldn’t have let them have such a high body count. I think you have to kill off people gradually instead of doing it so fast.
I don’t know. I kind of got the impression that they wanted to do more w/ her, but like so many other things, they ran out of time.