June 1

So I loved Click, and I loved Let’s Be Perverts, both of which are by the same author, Youngran Lee.  If you have not read either of those series, by all means do.  She’s got a series currently running on Netcomics too, Romance Papa, but I passed over that one for the time being because I have a pathological fear of the general plot (child created with your own donated sperm coming back to have you raise her)… even though I’m pretty sure the whole thing will be as fun as Click.  She’s got one other series on Netcomics right now, this one, so I thought I’d give it a whirl since I liked the other two so much.  edit: so yeah, holy crap, Let’s Be Perverts isn’t by Youngran Lee, it’s by Youjung Lee.  I’m not sure how I made that mistake, since Let’s Be Perverts is nothing like Click.  Guess I just got the names confused.  Both are still pretty good series, though, so I’ll let my comments stand.

So this is really, REALLY weird.  I’m having a hard time believing this series is newer than Click, because the storytelling style is certainly rougher than it was in that series.  The plot skips around between three or so groups of people, and a connection isn’t made between any of them until the end of the volume.  In fact, I thought the main characters from two of the groups were the same person for awhile, and I STILL don’t know what it is the characters in two of the groups do, as far as jobs and lifestyles et al.

Most of the attention is spent on one group of characters that seem to steer the main plot of the series.  A pair of doctors are doing what is apparently secret research into the cloning of humans.  One of the doctors is a very, VERY happily married man, and somehow… apparently the clones are all made to look like his wife.  I was very unclear about a lot of the specifics of this situation, like what the cover story for the pair of doctors was, who the head of the project was and what his motives were, and what the deal was with some of the clones that are running around.  The clones are all imperfect, and in addition to a 7-year life span, they are also sometimes mentally handicapped and… apparently occasionally gifted with the power to levitate objects?  Maybe?

The happily married couple, Dr. Gangjae and his wife Jaehee, spend a lot of time flirting, kissing, and doing it, most of which they do not hide from Gangjae’s friend.  Jaehee is kind of conceited, and I didn’t like her much… which is fine, because her circumstance changes about 3/4 of the way through the volume when a bunch of WEIRD stuff goes down.  Some of the plot concerns their 7-year-anniversary wedding as well as flashbacks between the two, but Jaehee apparently has made some enemies in her life, so… you know.

A lot of the dialogue is fairly joke-y, which is a little weird, but the joking abruptly stops when the tone of the series changes without warning towards the end of the book.  The humorous dialogue has a lot of asides in parentheses in the speech bubbles, which sometimes made it hard to follow.  In addition to the other two groups of characters that are unrelated to the clone stories, there are also a fair number of people I had trouble keeping track of in the main story, too.

The plot was plenty weird, and despite the fact I had trouble following the story due to the number of disparate elements, I am actually very much looking forward to the rest.  I think that everything will be pulled together with a fairly awesome and bizarre explanation as the story goes on, so I’m pretty confident that we’ll be treated to a pretty unique and complex mystery in volumes to come.  I still don’t think it’s quite up to her standards set in the other two titles I’ve read, but again, I’m pretty confident time will fix most of my problems with this.

Apparently it’s being serialized in Korea and the US simultaneously, but it hasn’t had an update since earlier in the year.  It makes me a little sad.  I do have the second volume here though, so here’s hoping the story goes interesting places.