Redmoon 1

Mina Hwang – ComicsOne – 2001 – 18 volumes
the English version is incomplete at volume 6

There are a strange number of MMORPGs that take their plots from manhwa, and even stranger, the manhwa are licensed in English.  The famous Lineage is one of them (Lineage was licensed by ADV Manga but never released), and prior to making Lineage, the game creator started with Nexus, based on Kingdom of the Winds, released by Netcomics.  Redmoon is another, and the graphic novels have a version of the game handily bundled into the back.  ComicsOne released this in 2001 (possibly making it one of the oldest manhwa in English, along with the ComicsOne version of NOW?), and they stopped after 6 volumes, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pick up all of them recently.  Especially since I love fantasy comics and promised to read more male-oriented manhwa.

Redmoon gets off to a non-traditional start, which is surprising in a sprawling fantasy epic like this.  This entire volume is spent at a high school, in the life of a boy named Philar.  Philar is beginning to experience strange surges of power, like the ability to singlehandedly take out local gangs that pester him at arcades and in class.  Soon he finds himself the subject of bizarre accidents, like earthquakes and falling basketball hoops.  The accidents are always severe, but somehow Philar lives through them when a regular person would not.  It soon becomes clear he is the subject of a debate between two powerful beings from another world, and may or may not be the former king of a fantasy kingdom who has sealed himself into a regular high school boy.  The king’s brother has seized power and has sent his former fiancee as an assassin to eliminate any possible form that the old king might take.  The fiancee is sure that Philar is not their king.   He may have fooled her by changing his name to Philar, a clever alias and completely unlike hiss real name, Philaro.  Philaro Bercanees Feliwoono.

Towards the end of the book, the assassination attempts get increasingly more hilarious as the characters possess random passerbys that conjure knives and get thrown into rivers.  Philar befriending a very confused boy that stabs him and nearly drowns was one of the highlights of the book for me.

The volume takes a long time to read, and I got very caught up in the story despite the fact it doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary or terribly exciting (aside from, again, being a sprawling fantasy epic that takes place in modern times… or the 1980s, whatever).  It does take its time and is very careful about developing its characters.  I feel like I’ll have more of a bead on it after I figure out whether the story will take place in a fantasy world (very likely) or in the real world with the young Philar.  This was mostly exposition, but it did leave me interested and ready to dive into the story proper.