Manga Review: Dokebi Bride Volume 2

[Floating_Sakura]

Title: Dokebi Bride volume 2
Author: Marley
Published: Netcomics USD9.99/CAD13.50

Dokebi Bride is the story of Sunbi, who, as a descendant of shamans, has the power to see things that others cannot. Volume two picks up the story where the prologue of volume one left off, at Sunbi's adjustment to living with her father's family in Seoul. The city proves to be much more spiritually dangerous than anything Sunbi has experienced, and right from the beginning something smelly follows her home from school. In the course of the volume, she meets Taehoon, a classmate who is obsessed with spirit photography (and gives a long-winded quantum-mechanical explanation of what it is,) an old monk with great spiritual powers, and a folklorist who tells her all about the dokebi and how they might be able to help her, along with a whole host of evil demons.

The English adaptation is decent. There are occasional awkward sentences that distract from the natural flow of English, but there are no glaring errors, and on the whole it is nicely done. The sound effects are all translated, and well-edited into the existing art.

The art has a slight stylized crudeness that I continue to appreciate as I read the book for its appropriateness to depicting evil spirits. The dragon in volume one was beautiful, but it was nothing compared to the grotesquery of the demons in this volume. The demons are drawn more textured than the scenery, they are distorted and alien, with bizarrely shaped muscles and dripping maggots and empty eyes. They are really deliciously despicable, compellingly frightening, and perfectly, utterly grotesque. I am glad to have read this book if only just to see that. Marley's use of page space remains good, giving ample space to depict the horrors of the zombie following Sunbi home from school, the vision of demons hanging over the classroom, and the distorted mass of evil spirits pursuing Sunbi.

As for the storytelling, it is odd in that it depends very little on any kind of central conflict to drive it from chapter to chapter. As in the first volume, each chapter has a shape driven by its own small-scale conflict, but the larger mysteries -- Sunbi's mother's death and Sunbi's own mystic abilities -- are too understated to pull the chapters together very much at this point. This kind of storytelling makes sense because Sunbi doesn't know very much about these things, and has no way of knowing; she just has to depend on time and luck to draw the knowledge to her, and the reader is sharing that journey. For this reason, the story reads very like a slice-of-life kind of story, following the day-to-day life of a teenage girl who just happens to have evil spirits chasing her. In order to enjoy that kind of story, you have to like monstrous creatures creeping up on your heroine at every turn (to which I admit a certain partiality,) and have a certain amount of patience for discovering a readily discernible motive because at this pace I expect there will be more monsters before there are many revelations.

Such monsters as these, and the promise of more, with more varieties, are worthwhile.

Reviewed by: anitra
Proofed by: Iliana
Edited by: Firedog

Buy Dokebi Bride: Volume 2 from Amazon.com