Narration of Love at 17 1

So… the paperback output from Netcomics has been down to a trickle lately, probably due to x and y factors, economy, blah blah blah.  I’ve been broken of my dislike of reading their stuff online, but that doesn’t mean I still wouldn’t rather read paperbacks.  I still like buying a whole bunch of stuff during the Right Stuf studio sales, but there’s been less and less new stuff from Netcomics for each sale, so I tend to go back for the old stuff.  Narration of Love at 17 is an older series, both in terms of when it was first published in Korea and when Netcomics started publishing it, and I was actually surprised by how much I like it.

As much as it probably doesn’t sound like it given the fact I rave about Skip Beat and Honey Hunt, I like to stay away from series that focus on acting because it’s such an easy hook.  For some reason, I don’t trust stories to integrate the acting parts well, and I just… don’t like them, usually.  The characters here are in an acting club at school.  This series is, for all intents and purposes, a romance manga, but the characters talk about acting all the time.  The president of the acting club is one of the romantic interests, and the main character and her rival compete for the same part in the play.  But the play is never shown or described, and the part itself isn’t really discussed so much as the fact the girls are (sort of) competing for it.  I have to say, I kind of like the hands off approach, because I could go without having to drag my way through another school play or whatever, and we still get the drama (no pun intended) that goes along with the theatre club.

Narration of Love at 17 is actually a pretty serious series.  It starts off with the main character, Seyoung, confessing her feelings to her childhood friend Hyunwoo, and getting brutally rejected when he thinks she’s just practicing for an acting role on him.  Her rival, Hyemi, the pretty and talented star of the acting club, winds up getting a television series and breaking her committment to the club in order to take a television role.  To add insult to injury, Hyemi also clearly has a crush on Hyunwoo.  Hyunwoo is oblivious to this, but he spends less and less time with Seyoung.  Seyoung takes her anger out on Hyunwoo when he is around, which pushes him further away.

There’s actually kind of a good balance of rival love and hate.  As much as she would love to hate Hyemi, Hyemi is actually a nice girl, and Seyoung can admit to herself that the sole reason she doesn’t like her is because she is jealous.  She also can’t stop herself from being angry at clueless Hyunwoo, even though she knows this isn’t how to go about making him understand how she feels.  A lot of the comic focuses on Seyoung’s introspection and analysis of the people around her, which is interesting despite a bit of a foggy adaptation.

This series actually stops and lets the reader think about situations after they happen, rather than going from one situation to another and letting the characters sort everything out for you.  There’s a lot of things that remain unsaid between everybody, including what is obviously, but never overtly spoken of, an attraction between the president of the drama club and Seyoung.  It’s subtle, and kind of a nice read.  As much as I like contemporary shoujo comics, it’s almost like taking a breath of fresh air to go back to an older one, which are somehow very different, even if they are only 10 or so years behind.

I did like the first volume, but it’s still got a ways to go before it becomes a classic-must-read-type series.