Audition 2
June 14, 2009
Yeah, things got off to a pretty amazing start in this volume. After some preliminaries where the boys fool Buok and introduce themselves to one another, the actual training to be idols gets underway. Aside from being innately talented, none of them know the first thing about making real music, so they start out several steps behind everyone else in the competition.
Most of this volume is spent introducing the eccentricities of the characters… most of the focus is put on Raeyong, the youngest member. He’s pretty extreme and more than a little nuts. He frequently goes off on tangents, has random outbursts, and does things like wear newspaper hats to school. This is explained in the book as a manic-depressive personality, but it seems to go far beyond that. Dal Bong and Mickey hit it off right away despite the fact that Mickey is mistaken for a woman, and Chul sits back and watches everyone do their thing. Their roles in music don’t come up until the very end of the volume, but their collaboration on their song of choice (a fictional concept album called “Swan Song,” which features a song that builds on itself until it finishes with an amazing flourish that culminated in the band members committing suicide immediately after). They all squabble and go back and forth about other songs, but they all four agree that Swan Song is the one they absolutely must perform for the first leg of the competition.
There are other complications, too. Myung-Ja has been blacklisted by most of her music industry contacts by Dukchool, the one who stands to take control of the company if she fails to fulfill the terms of her father’s will. As a result, the group can’t get real insturments and doesn’t get a new recording studio. But it seems like the boys are pretty happy with what they had in the end.
The only complaints I had were, surprisingly, with the art. I loved Chon’s art in DVD, and I didn’t notice so much in the first volume of Audition, but she uses a lot of techniques/bad habits that took me years to learn to stop doing. One of the things that bothers me most is “high hair,” women with hair that is laying down, but it’s laying down on a skull that is much higher than it should be. There are also likely intentional abnormalities with the positioning of the features on the face that bother me. There are lots of art faux pas that I forgive, but non-stylized anatomy blunders are a big no-no for me.
But I’m dying to see the boys in the competition and where they go musically from here. It’s clear that Big Stuff is in store, so I hope that volume three sees the light of day somewhere, somehow.
June 16, 2009 at 8:11 am
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