Audition 1
June 1, 2009
I’ve wavered about buying this series for years. On one hand, I really, really liked DVD, Kye Young Chon’s other series. On the other hand, I don’t think there’s a very good chance that volume 3 and up will come out in English, which is unfortunate. Curiosity won out in the end.
This one is… kind of weird, but not as weird as DVD. It starts off with two women who were friends/enemies in school. Buok runs a (rather unsuccessful) PI business, and is nonplussed to see her old classmate Myung-ja walk in. Myung-ja confesses that her eccentric father, head of one of the largest music production companies in Korea, left a stipulation in his will for Myung-ja’s inheritance. He vaguely describes four boys he met over the years who were musical geniuses in different ways. In order to inherit the company, Myung-ja has to track down the boys through the poor notes that her father kept in his diary, get them together in a musical group, and win a gigantic nationwide American Idol-like competition. Not just place, but win. If she can’t do this, she doesn’t get a single red cent of her dad’s money and can’t touch his music business.
This is actually pretty ridiculous, and it gets even weirder when the hints for each boy are things like “Met him on the train tracks in such-and-such town. He told me about hearing certain notes in nature and matching up the sounds into complex chords. He ran off before I could get his name. Amazing.” Also: “Saw a boy nearly drown while I was on the beach at such-and-such location. He had an incredibly loud voice. Didn’t get his name.” The two girls are, of course, successful at finding each of the boys, and it’s kind of fun to see them pick up on little details. For instance, the boy who nearly drowned had a rare blood type that they tracked him with, and some of the hints for the boys send them bouncing around from place to place interviewing all sorts of people that slowly reveal the life and background of each boy.
None of them really agree to Myung-ja’s plan, however, and the book ends a few days before the audition deadline for the prelim competition. One or two of the boys are considering it, but the outlook is grim. Since this is a fictional series, I’m pretty sure that we can count on all four of them gathering next volume, but I am extremely curious about the structure of the series from there. The story is unusual, it’s got a great sense of humor, and admittedly, I like series about boy bands. Hopefully volume 2 will offer a peek into what the rest of the series will be like.
June 1, 2009 at 6:02 am
[...] Library Girl on vol. 3 of Antique Bakery (A Library Girl’s Familiar Diversions) Connie on vol. 1 of Audition (Slightly Biased Manga) D.M. Evans on vol. 1 of B.Ichi (Manga Jouhou) John Thomas on vol. 4 of [...]
June 2, 2009 at 9:25 pm
If this were anyone else, I think I’d stay away from such a wacky premise, but seeing what Kye Young Chon made with some of the odder elements in DVD has me convinced that Audition’s probably going to be terrific, too.
I’m still pinning my hopes on Yen Press to rescue DramaQueen’s ailing manhwa line.
June 3, 2009 at 3:19 am
Yeah, Audition kind of gets off to a rocky start, but I was pretty intrigued by the end of the first volume. The two female detectives are a little hard to follow at first, and there are some definite logical leaps when it comes to tracking down the boys (the first one was literally “we went to the town and found out about him”), but I am curious to see what comes next.
And yeah, I would love to see a rescue from Yen Press or Netcomics (DQ has a series called Peter Panda by the artist of Do Whatever You Want that I’ve been dying to read, and I know that Netcomics was supposedly interested in DVD before DQ licensed it). I secretly keep hoping that somehow DramaQueen will find the funding to get back up, but… it’s probably not very likely. I only worry that the licenses haven’t somehow been tied up. I suspect that there are problems like that with some CPM manhwa and maybe a few of the ADV series, too.