Manhwa Monday: 11/30/09

Welcome to another installment of Manhwa Monday! First off, our featured review this week comes from Snow Wildsmith at the School Library Journal’s Good Comics for Kids, discussing volumes one and two of Sugarholic. Here’s a bit of what Snow says about this fish-out-of-water tale: “Readers … will be intrigued … as they are caught up in the whirlwind storyline. Even two volumes is not enough to get all of the characters completely introduced and the major plot points outlined. There’s a sort of controlled chaos going on in the story, where the plot is always on the edge of falling apart, but somehow still manages to hold together. There aren’t many answers in these two volumes, but the questions are interesting enough to make readers head for volume three and beyond.” Check out her review for more!

As a follow-up to last week’s post, Troisroyaumes posted a rebuttal to Daniella Orihuela-Gruber’s original post, Why is Manhwa not as popular as Manga? mainly taking issue with Daniella’s broad generalizations about both manhwa and Korean culture based on just a few translated series. Daniella responded to this in her blog in a very mature manner. Over at Seeking Avalon, Avalon’s Willow joins in on the conversation a bit as well.

In another follow-up to last week, Heidi McDonald over at PW’s The Beat does have access to The Wall Street Journal article about manhwa and talks about it (and other articles) here. On a very different note, Geoffry Cain at the GlobalPost asks, Will Korean manhwa replace manga? The headline seems a bit out of step with the article itself, but it’s quite interesting.

Now, the reviews! It’s all Yen Press this week in the manhwa blogosphere. Lori Henderson looks at volumes 5-7 of Goong over at Comics Village, Michelle Smith reviews the fourth and fifth volumes of Very! Very! Sweet at Soliloquy in Blue and Manga Recon, respectively, and here at Manga Bookshelf, guest reviewer Megan M. talks about volume nine of The Antique Gift Shop. Meanwhile, Tiamat’s Disciple checks out a slew of new volumes, including Legend (Vol. 6), Very! Very! Sweet (Vol. 5), Angel Diary (Vol. 10), The Antique Gift Shop (Vol. 9), and You’re So Cool (Vol. 4).

Goong makes an appearance in last week’s “Shôjo-Sunjeong Alphabet” post from David Welsh at Precious Curmudgeon. Also, last week began an onslaught of Manga Gift Guide posts from bloggers all over. I featured a number of manhwa titles in Manga Bookshelf’s Manga/Manhwa Gift Guide, including Goong, Mijeong (NBM), In The Starlight (NETCOMICS) and others. I’m not the only one who included manhwa titles, either. Check out David Welsh’s gift guide directory here.

That’s it for this week!

Is there something I’ve missed? Leave your manhwa-related links in comments!

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