Manga Reflection – Soul to Seoul Vol. 1

Now, I know I said that I don’t like to type about manga, but here we are. My first real post is about manwha. Bad manwha. Why is it so easy to get fired up about bad things? I wanted to write about Ataru Nakamura’s (decent) debut album, but I read this and just need to express my anger with it.

I read a preview of Soul to Seoul in one of those free Tokyopop samplers they give out on Free Comic Book day. I kind of picked up a homophobic/racist vibe to it (in just 15 pages too!), and having originally wanted to pick it up just because if the cute title (and because I though that the girl was a guy, which would have made it yaoi, which would have made it a must read), I put it off. But every time I went to Chapters, it was there, teasing me with it’s pun-ish title. “Buy me, buy me” it said. Well, today I was at my local comic book shop, and blindly grabbed volume 1, since Chapters only ever had later volumes. Well, bad idea, very bad idea.

I read this on the bus, and about every fifty or so pages I had to stop reading, take a deep breath, and continue, otherwise I would have thrown the book down and stomped on it. Where to begin! Okay, so this story takes place in America to a bunch of Korean-blooded people. Half-Korean, Exchange student, Second-generation Korean-American, Adoptee. And every single one of them has bad experiences with non-Korean – mainly black or white people. And as I was reading it a long, I realized a pattern. Half-Korean Spike only wants to date Korean girls since they remind him of his Korean mother who was an angel. His African-American father is an alcoholic who takes money from him. Exchange student Sunil’s black and white friends are really mean to her, and she’s an outcast (this could also because her English isn’t that good, but that’s not the way it’s painted). Half-Korean Kai is a total player, but becomes serious for a Korean girl, thus implicitly saying all the other non-Korean girls were whores. Okay, whatever. All this was fucking stupid, but I could deal with it. I hadn’t really picked up the pattern of “ALL NON-KOREANS ARE EVIL!!1” yet, but something got me thinking about it.

Okay, so Kai is half-Korean half-Caucasian. He gets a phone call from his dad saying that grandfather is coming. I assume that this means his father’s father, who I assume is white, since I figured that this manwha wouldn’t put a white girl and Korean guy together just from the general bad portrayal of non Korean women I picked up. But no, a Korean grandfather arrives! Okay, so…a Korean guy and white lady actually hooked up in this manwha? Sweet, this manwha gets bonus points from white me, who totally crushing on Korean music group’s Epik High’s Tablo. In any case, grandfather hates Kai since he’s blond, old people racism blahblahblah…skip ahead to a flashback scene. Kai’s Korean (I need to keep the nationalities in play to show my point) daddy is getting verbally smacked down by granddaddy. “I know you married the girl out of love, but this is a disgrace!” says granddaddy…ooh, so now I’m confused. He’s now married to a Korean woman in the present. Thus continuing the cycle to how non-Koreans are so totally evil. BUT WAIT! Let’s add to the confusion!! Kai has a 100% Korean little sister, Gelda. When he’s in the club with this friends, and they’re commenting on how a street kid that his family is calling “little brother” doesn’t look like him when Gelda does, one of the friends says “Even Gelda resembles you a bit Kai…even though you have different fathers.” Wait, hold up a minute. Wasn’t Kai’s biological mother white? She must be, since while there’s never a clear shot of his father, he’s obviously Korean since he was the one getting yelled at by Korean granddaddy for shaming the Korean family. But he and Gelda, a full Korean, have the same biological mother now. But…if Gelda’s 100% Korean, this is impossible! So…what the fuck is going on? All I know is this – a Korean mommy who “looks like Kai when she smiles” (according to Sunil) is looking after Kai as his mother. And his father is Korean too which means that once again, the non-Korean parent is a terrible bastard and have abandoned his/her child, while a Korean parent is doing good and raising some kid that’s not theirs.

Okay, so although I’m confused about the above, I’m gonna assume it’s a Tokyopop re-write/typo that they didn’t think entirely through. And I’m even dealing relatively well with the shitty way non-Koreans are portrayed – it’s all pretty implicit up until this point.
But now – ohohoho, this is when I was about to seriously chuck the mother fucking book OUT. A street kid that the family has taken in, J.J. talks about his past. He’s a Korean adoptee baby who was adopted by a black & white couple. “They intentionally adopted an Asian kid due to their mischievous nature.” And the abandoned him “like a pet when they were tired of it”. Oh. Hells. No. Yeah, they named him weird (Judas Jesus), so as people they were probably not all that stable, but to blame the wanting to adopt him on their “mischievous nature”?? This just rubbed me the wrong way. Typing it out now, it’s not so bad, but the whole story of his past basically unfolded like “I never felt accepted until I moved in with a Korean family”, and the shitty non-Korean parents were enough to make me want to throw the book away. This was honestly the most retarded scene that I have ever read in any comic, ever. And I read Blame!.

Aaanyway, there were some saving moments, like Spike’s story, which is oddly engaging, and this looks like next volume is going to be a bad “Let Dai” rip-off (I mean, Kai is a rich gangster who is totally cool…why, he’s a straight Dai with a K!), but Spike’s scenes take up less that 10% of the manwha, and I could actually read “Let Dai”. While I’m tempted to see what happens next (since Kai is gonna bust a cap in someone’s ass next volume!!), I also know that I’ll have to wade through a ton of pro-Korean (read – AZN PRIDE Y’ALL!!) bullshit to get to the scenes that mean something. The author seems like some person who has never left Korea and has cooked up America as some Korean-melting-pot place where the Korean bloodline is being “contaminated”. This could be interesting propaganda, but in the end, the story isn’t terribly involvingand it’s kind of easy to see where it is going. And it’s REALLY easy to see why this has become an online exclusive (Read – one of Tokyopop’s titles that isn’t selling enough at brick and mortar outlets).

But even so…even so this has, in my mind, despicable morals, and all the problems I listed above, I can’t turn away. This is a trainwreck waiting to happen. I love the dynamic between Spike and Kai – they are the romance in this manwha, and I just want to see where it goes. This is like my relationship with Hot Gimmick – I hated the morals (I do not find it cute or sexy that a girl would let herself be taken advantage of by Ryoki time and time again. The first volume sickened me with all the potential rape scenes.) But I read all the other volumes, hating each one more than the next until the shiteous ending, which was we all knew was going to happen, but I didn’t want to happen. But it was so bad that I had to see how it was going to suck it’s way to the end. The term they used on ANN is “a trainwreck” (but they use it in a positive sense). I just had to see how this girl was going to make all the wrong decisions to land herself a shiteous boyfriend. When it ended, I could see her in the future strapped down with 6 kids and just as depressed as his parents were. “Trainwreck” applies to Soul to Seoul too – I just can’t look away while all this shit happens to unlikable people. Maybe it makes me feel better about myself, as in shitty people get punished too. But I have a feeling that, past all the racism engrained in the story, the characters just aren’t Hot Gimmick level hateable. Or even likable. They are their ethnicity, as described in a chart in the back of the book, stating how each one was Korean (along with hobbies and such, but the first thing – nationality). It’s just the racism I find hatable, and not the characters themselves. If I feel like some AZN pride propoganda, I’ll read volume 2 in the store and record my thoughts here but for now:

Final Grade – 2/10 (It would be 4 or 3/10, which is still a fail, but all the hate is too much!! This is really one of the most derivative, hateful thing I have ever read -_-.)