Manga A Day: Dokebi Bride vol 5 (and other volumes revisited)

Amazon.com: Dokebi Bride: Volume 5 (Dokebi Bride): Books: Marley ISBN: 1600090796 ISBN-13: 9781600090790

This is the last volume of Dokebi Bride I have, so I'll be moving on to something else tomorrow. I haven't decided what yet, it'll be hard follow a complex story like this one with a regular manga. Volume five likes to jump around a lot and once again I don't know where the story is going, but I like how it gets there. This volume introduces a whole bunch of new characters, but I don't know how many will stick around for future volumes. It's a very special episode of Dokebi Bride.

In volume four, a young shaman showed up and asked for Sunbi's grandmother's shaman armory claiming it as her own. In volume five we go back into the past a bit and get to learn about the shaman, Hwaran. It's interesting that there is no villain in Dokebi Bride. Here is a woman who shows up on Sunbi's doorstep and asks her for the last mementoes she has of her grandmother, and the flashback is meant to give us understanding why Hwaran should have them. At the same time, there are no heroes. Hwaran is imperfect and not terribly sympathetic, but you understand her. The same is true for Sunbi's family, Sunbi herself, her Dokebi Gwangsoo, and just about any other character introduced.

Sunbi does not react well to being told to give up her grandmother's artifacts. Sunbi pushes Hwaran's buttons by talking to the guardian spirits that she's having trouble communicating with. Hwaran retaliates by trying to forcibly read Sunbi's spirit. Sunbi throws her off easily, but in the ensuing fit manages to reopen painful wounds with her father. Hwaran is thrown out, but takes the armory with her, all except for the sword. Sunbi manages to keep that for herself.

So upset with having to part with the last of her memories of her grandmother that Sunbi runs away and the story picks up two months later with her living on the street. She falls into a runaway community and the rest of the story plays out, something like one of those "very special" tv episodes that deal with teen "issues." Of course with an added dash of the same supernatural flair the overall story has. It's not just a filler volume as we do learn some important stuff about Sunbi's strained relationship with her father.

To keep things light we also have a bit with Gwangsoo, who despite being a mystical being, can't find Sunbi either and misses his "bride" lots. He tries a charm in desperation to get her to come home. He has to sneak into her room and in the process we get to meet another new character, who at the moment has no name. He's the first attractive male they've introduced into the series, so if there is a true love interest for Sunbi in this story I'm guessing he's it. In the previous volumes there was mention of a son of Sunbi's mother's friend who would be coming to stay and all signs point to Mr "likes to run around without a shirt on" being him.

So I've talked a lot about Dokebi Bride's complex and layered story and keep promising to talk about the art. Marley is the exact opposite of most manga and manwha artists. With most artists, they focus on the characters and backgrounds come later if at all. Usually, even if the proportions might be off, manga artists focus on making their characters express and their backgrounds are stiff and utilitarian. In Dokebi Bride often times the environment is much more expressive then the people that inhabit the space.

The characters are inconsistently drawn, often having a very attractive and detailed introductory "image shot" and then becoming less detailed in simpler in the rest of the book. This is how artists typically establish scenery, a very detailed shot to "frame" the scene in your mind and then just using suggestion to fill in the blanks in subsequent panels. I get the feeling that she designs the characters, lacks the skill to make them express properly. Sunbi's father, for example, has two expressions, eyebrows up and eyebrows down. Eyebrows up is when he's surprised. Eyebrows down is for when he's angry, concerned, thinking, worried, or any time he's not surprised. She is especially weak when trying to express extreme emotion. Take these panels where Sunbi's step sister is being snide:

Sunbi's sister is the blonde who's features are wandering around her face. I think this is supposed to Marly's version of "super deformed" and it feels really inappropriate to the story. Everything else (even the dokebi and spirits) are so realistically drawn that any kind of exaggeration like this seems out of place. And that housekeeper is actually drawn like that all the time, unimportant characters don't even get real features or care.

But, that's not to discount the real beauty that hides in these books. Click on these two thumbnails to see two beautiful spreads (sorry for the poor scans).

When she wants to detail, she does it and it's gorgeous. Her inhuman characters have way more personality then her humans, just look at this picture of Gwangsoo showing off his bride Sunbi to all his dokebi friends. (Sunbi can't see them at the moment)

And her horror images really can't be beat. Check out this spirit, one of the group that torments Sunbi when she first comes to Seoul. (Don't click on this thumbnail if you're eating.)

And she's funny! She tosses little things that make me laugh all the time.

Pretty much any time the Dokebi's show up, something funny happens. I haven't been able to pin it down, but the dokebi dialogue bits always remind me of Neil Gamian. There was one part in particular where the dokebis are gathered to around Sunbi's buckwheat jelly offering. They sit and debate if they should eat it or not, and in each panel there is a little turnip shaped dokebi that says nothing but "Jelly!" It so reminded me of something that could have happened in Sandman that I actually tried to think if something similar had ever happened.  ( I couldn't think of anything). In volume five, there is a great joke panel where Gwangsoo (above) is crawling across a ceiling and suddenly he's dressed in a spiderman costume.

I look forward to the next volume, it's rare to find a story that keeps your interest even when you have absolutely no idea where it's going. If she could just make her human characters express as freely as her dokebi do, this manwha would be flawless.