Language: English
Direction: Left to Right
by: Youjung Lee
Publisher: NetComics
Type: Series
Genre: Fantasy, Shonen
Synopsis:At first glance Moolchi is just another shy, unassuming boy whose greatest talents are running away from bullies and binging on vitamin supplements. Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, Moolchi’s absentee father sends him a most unusual gift–a stunningly-proportioned ‘girl’ who may or may not be made of flesh and blood. She calls herself ‘Six’ and mumbles incoherently about having a ‘prime directive.’ This strange and exquisite creature quickly turns the boy’s life upside-down, violently disposing of junior-high hooligans and anybody else who gets in his or her way, all while wearing a getup that would make Barbarella blush. In the midst of these baffling occurrences, Moolchi just can’t seem to stop worrying about his German homework. The word ‘oblivious’ barely does him justice as Moolchi remains blissfully unaware of his father’s dangerous double-life, or the cute hall monitor who harbors a crush on him, or the intentions of this mysterious femme fatale who insists on bathing with him. Meanwhile, ominous storm clouds gather on the horizon, and one lingering question looms above the others…who is this so-called ‘Zero’ that everybody is looking for?
Character Musings:
Moolchi is a dweeb, pure and simple. He’s always the victim of bullies, gets pushed around by the teachers, and ignored by the girls. He’s always popping vitamin pills and longs to be strong so he can have his revenge.
Jong-E is a machine, supposedly. She’s been sent to protect Moolchi but seems to cause more trouble than she resolves. She’s supposed to listen to his orders, but tends to ignore him at the weirdest times.
There are a couple of others I considered adding here, but since they died rather quickly, or just didn’t leave an impact, I decided against it.
General Musings:
I had high hopes for this series after reading volume one, and for a little while it sort of lived up to them. However it falls short in several areas.
One of the biggest issues have with this series Is that so little is really explained, we’re expected to accept that ‘x’ happens for no apparent reason.
Before I go on lets get one thing clear, I liked this series. Despite it’s many flaws it was a fairly decent read.
So lets explore the flaws. The biggest one, and the one that cripples the series, is it’s length. Youjung started off with a fairly decent pace, but I’m guessing one of two things happened, He either realised he was running out of pages to tell the whole story, or the publisher cut the page count. Either way we suddenly go from a free flowing series to one that’s disjointed and leaves so much unexplained.
The way the story plays out makes sense, on it’s own. However the way Youjung tries to explain it makes it all the more confusing, because he simply just dumps all the information. Although he does attempt to straighten out Moolchi’s past, it’s done in a similar matter. However he changes his mind at the end and basically says something different.
Usually this wouldn’t be an issue, since if it’s done right we have an excellent plot twist. However this is an example of how not to do it, all we have is confusion.
The way the final fight plays out is just a total mess, we get more information dumped, leading to more confusion and questions, and then the fight just ends. Tie into that the way Youjung ends the volume and it’s hard not to frown at it.
Jong-E goes through so many changes over the volume, and almost none of them made any sense, and then at the very end it’s like everything that had happened previously (regarding her and her personality) suddenly didn’t happen, and all we have is teenage girl. Which does give the ending a bit of an “ewwww†factor.
The art is another thing that goes through some changes. Youjung’s art does improve a lot over the course of the series, but at the same time some of the characters go through some design changes.
The settings are okay, but some didn’t feel natural to me, rather they felt like stock art that had been bleached of colour then drawn over.
Yet in all fairness, if you can buy without getting bogged down in trying to figure out the who, what, where and why of things, it’s a fairly decent series. The ending is predictable, but it’s a series that’s worth buying for nothing but a brainless read.
Publisher Musings:
NetComics went with both the digital and print release of this series. The print run is heading towards OOP judging by the levels of stock availability in the UK. The digital version can be rented for a 48hour period, the full set of five volumes costs just $5, thats a mere $1 per volume.
As with all of their other releases the SFX’s are translated, edited out and replaced with the english versions. Personally I don’t like this, but credit where credit due, they did do a good job with it.
Also on the digital version the fonts used were a fairly decent size, making them easy to read and follow. So you wont get tired eyes reading all 5 volumes in a single sitting (which I did).
One thing to remember however is that you only have 48hours to read them, after this they expire and you have to re-hire them again, so I advise you to rent them on a volume by volume basis.
