One thousand and one nights

Yesterday I bought the manhwa One thousand and one nights, by Han SeungHee and Jeon JinSeok. You already know the plot, although there's a shounen-ai/yaoi twist and a whiff of potential incest because it wouldn't be manhwa without it. Sehara is a lovely young man* living with his sister Dunya, who wants to marry him although he's weirded out by that, in the city of the mad hot sultan Shahryar. Shahryar, of course, was betrayed by his wife who was also his late father's lover to make it more incestalicious and thus takes a new wife every night and beheads her in the morning. In order to save Dunya, Sehara disguses himself as a woman and goes to the sultan in her place.

We get backstory on the sultan when Sehara is unmasked and thrown into prison to await execution and meets the sultan's former advisor and best friend, Jafar. After all that, we finally get to the bit where Sehara starts telling stories. He only tells one in this volume, that of Turandot, but somehow I suspect the sultan won't behead him after this so he can tell the next story.

Anyway, someone who's more attuned to story in these things than I am can get it and comment on that. The characters aren't particularly deep, but I thought the art was on the good side of average. The line tends to be a bit heavier and more varied than shoujo-style books usually are, which is a change, but the artist lifts some of the solidity by breaking the line here and tehre with white spots, which I'll have to try.

I also like this, because of a page included in the back, which shows a bit of the team's working practice: the writer writes it by sketching simple panel layouts out with dialogue and notes, which the artist then fleshes out into the pages. And I would absolutely love to try to do a story in this fashion.

( Scan of the page under here )

* So what's the Korean translation for "bishounen"? Is there an equivalent?