Monday, August 11, 2008

Aspirin, vol. 1

By Eun-Jeung Kim
Released in the US by TokyoPop


Slugline: Never has a title been such an accurate descriptor of the drugs I needed after reading it.

This is another one of those manga that thinks by being self-referential, they can get away with having a ridiculous plot and have random things happen. Why? Because the characters seem to know that they are in a manga and absurd plot contrivances and weird coincidences happen in manga all the time, so why bother stringing together the very basic plot structure. Or have characters be internally consistent or even have motivations beyond the most basic? Someone unleashes the four gods, but he really didn't and he was set up to take the fall, but he can do it because someone says he can, blah blah blah. Didn't care, the main lead is a cipher, the only person that that I felt the least amount of connection to was Samson, the nun who mom had relations with the Angel Samson, which is wrong on so many Biblical levels that I can't even begin to describe. The art is okay, the actual mechanics of storytelling is decent, it's just the story itself that is trying to be told makes very little sense and has even less desire to be so.



Aspirin, vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

- Ferdinand

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was looking at this just recently. Random is good. Your review inspires me to buy it.

Anonymous said...

Err. That was me. Never left a comment on Blogger.com before.

Prospero's Manga said...

No worries, it seems that Blogger is always adding some new function somewhere, changing things about.

If you really like random, check out many of the manhwa or Korean titles, for some reason their stories just seem to skip around all over the place, at least to me.