Unshelved

It’s been a lively week here for the Manhwa Moveable Feast! Here are links to a few recent contributions as we head off into the weekend:

First, at Extremely Graphic, Sadie Mattox uses her always powerful wit to compare the Color of Water to Dawson’s Creek:

“There’s been a lot of heat over why Ehwa seems so…delicate. But the answer is clear. It says so in the book – she’s a flower. Duh. A flower like Joey Potter. Which makes Bongsoon Jen Lindley. Look I dislike the flower analogy as much as the next person but it’s a comforting one. This whole book is about comfort, finding it in the past, finding it in innocence, finding it in love. There’s an entire bad world out there where people are not beautiful flowers and there’s plenty of books written about it.” …

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The subject of sexism in the Color trilogy became central in yesterday’s new contributions to the Manhwa Moveable Feast, beginning with David Welsh’s post “Good girls don’t.

I’m not really inclined to appreciate Kim Dong Hwa’s The Color of… trilogy as an accurate representation of its time. I’m not a cultural historian, so I have no idea what things were like for women in pre-industrial Korea. I just know that I don’t really care for its portrayal of “good” women as passive and patient, no matter how elegantly drawn it is. “I think that the process of a girl becoming a woman is one of the biggest mysteries and wonders of life,” the creator said in an interview. I wish he had thought harder about that mystery and hadn’t imposed what strikes me as such a male notion of wonder upon it.

David goes on to discuss Kim’s treatment of Ehwa’s sexually active friend, Bongsoon.…

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June’s Manhwa Moveable Feast has just begun its third day and things look lively! Here’s a quick rundown of the most recent contributions from participants.

First, from Erica Friedman at Okazu (hosted here for lack of yuri) comes a review of the third book in the Color series, The Color of Heaven.

While Erica praises the book’s artwork, she takes issue with its metaphoric vision of a woman as an eternally rooted being with no purpose other than to wait for a man to distinguish her from the lot.

“I felt that the language of the book was both very beautiful and awkward. Laced heavily with unrealistic platitudes that are increasingly heaped upon our heads, many of them about the “lot of women,” I began to find the dialogue burdensome. Women, we are told, are plain trees in the winter that wait …

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Review by Erica Friedman

In any series focusing on the passage of a girl from childhood to womanhood, the focus almost invariably tends to be on the relationship between the young woman and her partner. Their recognition of their interest in and eventually, desire for, one another takes up a great deal of the narrative.

In Color of Heaven, Ehwa’s journey to adulthood is told through the shifting relationship she has with her mother – a woman who has chosen the same fate as the one Ehwa now embraces. They both sit and wait for the man they love to return to them to give their lives meaning.

Ehwa, at the opening of the book, has already matured beyond her best friend and peer. While the other girl speaks of the men she might have and the wedding she aspires to, Ehwa has already set that phase aside…

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