Laon 1

YoungBin Kim / Hyun You – Yen Press – 2010 – 6+ volumes

For some reason, I felt guilty about not starting a new Yen Press series this year, and I love folktale-inspired series, so here I am with the first couple volumes of Laon.

Honestly, the most interesting thing so far has been the art. The art is pretty fantastic, with lots of thick, heavy outlines, lots of black, and lots of crazy angles and facial expressions. The flow of the story is helped immensely by the art, and I think this would have fizzled and died about halfway through if not for that.

The story is decent though, a good first volume that could develop into a fantastic action series. Laon is a young and confused supernatural being that butts heads with Tae-Ha, a man working at a National Enquirer-like newspaper in a dead-end reporter position. Laon is determined to find the Gumiho that stole his ears and tail, and Tae-Ha wants to help him. Sort of. Tae-Ha doesn’t like Laon, or much of anything, and Laon tends to beat him up and embarrass him a lot. It looks like the formula will follow the two as they go out on reporter investigations that Laon solves with his powers.

The investigation in this volume was pretty twisted, with a 16-year-old girl being held captive by her religious and very insane father, thinking that her pregnancy was immaculate and divine, the girl begging for help when Tae-Ha comes by dressed as a priest. Of course there’s some supernatural and parasitic bad stuff at work, and Laon helps settle things. It’s all very creepy and dramatic, and the art helps immensely.

Laon isn’t very likable at this point, one of those confused and forceful characters dropped from what seems to be the far past into modern times. The jokes about how he doesn’t know what anything is, and doesn’t know when the right time to use his powers, are already wearing thin. His severe case of bouncing from one thing to the next is also aggravating. Tae-Ha also has a sad lost lover and case of amnesia that isn’t very interesting right now… honestly the nine-tailed fox folklore and the art are what is making this worth reading. The folklore parts are very interesting, and it’s already dipped farther into the fox legends than anything that I’ve ever seen. The prospect of Laon gaining his powers little by little does make me want to read more. As does Laon’s gender ambiguity. That is, so far, really bizarre stuff.

Honestly, the bland flavor of everything else does seem like the kind of thing that will get better as the characters and story develop, so I’ve got no problem reading on into the second volume. The first volume is funky and unusual, and it did grab my attention, so it did its job well.