Manhwa Novella Collection 2: 9 Faces of Love

I know I never talk about news on here, but DAMN, Be Beautiful!  The word is that Libre may just be jerks, but you know, this is unsubstantiated.  I grew up in a small town, so I live for the juicy gossip.  I only hope my two volumes of the Finder series didn’t get lost in the mail like I think they did.  I always have this secret fear that my mail will be seized and somehow I’ll be arrested on archaic comstock laws or something like that, so hopefully that didn’t happen either.

Anyway.  The second volume of this series was much, MUCH better than the first.  I also liked it a lot better than any single volume of Can’t Lose You by the same author.  This is 9 short stories focused on the theme of love.  As you may imagine, some of them are only a few pages long, and a couple are slightly more developed.  There are plenty that are mediocre, including a “Doll”-like one with a twist at the end and the one at the very end which was kind of a lame fantasy.  But even these two weren’t absolutely terrible.

Some of the plots were amazing though, and I really wish something else had been done with the idea.  The best one was a guy who was such a big jerk and a womanizer that somehow he had been robbed of his ability to see women.  This didn’t bother him though, since he just uses them to have sex with anyway.  This would lay the scene for the most awesome manga ever, except it kind of turns into this mediocre story where the only girl he can see is the girl next door, who hates him, but she can’t see him, so he hangs out in her apartment all the time… things go from there…

There’s one which is a bit yuri that is entirely in first person.  There wasn’t much substance to it, but it was a cute love story, and I loved the gimmick.

Another was about a couple breaking up because they had so many little fights they finally made good on their threats, except as much as they fought they can’t stand the thought of being apart either, and neither will man up to face the other.

Another involves love at first site, then love again, and again, and again over several chance encounters through time.  This one was pretty cool too, though I had trouble getting into it the first few pages.

It reads a bit like a weird anthology, but I think it’s definitely worth checking out.  With nine brief stories, there’s bound to be something great in there for anyone who likes sentimental shoujo.