One thousand and one nights

[telophase]

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.







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

Comments

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Ooooh. I hadn't heard of this series, but I think I'm going to totally have to buy it.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

You know you want to (http://images.amazon.com/images/P/8952744705.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg).

That's the mad sultan there.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oooo....

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'd like to say I bought it for the art or story, but honestly I bought it for the mad sultan.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Hey, with mad sultans that look like that, what more do you need?

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

I do, I do!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

OK, OK, next time I will sketch it like that. Although your layout would be so much better than anything I could ever come up with... On the other hand, Weeping Pumpkin Liu is exactly the sort of drawing you'd get from me, so that should be amusing.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

XD I'm figuring that the layout would end up reworked anyway, but it'd be interesting to see what sort of effect it has on the pacing. XD I thought it was interesting that the thumbnails were mostly text.

I'm wondering if this is the sort of script/thumbnails that the Death Note writer hands over to the artist?

(You know that PBR's layout and pencilling went much faster once I started ripping off Saiyuki layouts? I highly recommend that approach. XD)

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I would absolutely love to try to do a story in this fashion.

If I was an artist I'd want to do something like that too, if only so I could laugh myself silly over my writer's stick-figure art. XD I love Lui's enourmous leaking eyes.

Ooooh, 1001 Nights.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

But they get the feeling of the panel across! XD

[homasse.livejournal.com]

*opera dork* He tells the story of Turandot? Ooh!*/opera dork*

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup! :) Takes up about half the book, too.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Writing: Um. Mixed feelings. Maybe later.

But you didn't mention the Sultan's hot best friend who (a) does what I always want characters in this story to do, namely calls the Sultan a monster for murdering random women just because his wife sleeps around; and (b) has glasses!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Hee. The cover was what attracted me to the book, and when I was flipping trhough it trying to decide if I liked the art enough to buy it, I saw the hot best friend who was ... scruffy! You hardly ever get good scruffy like that in manga. That clinched the deal.

I'm noting how they seem to be starting to build up a case that Something is Going On as regards to the sultan and his murderin' ways. It'll be interesting to see how they build that up in future volumes - that's something that Threads of Time almost did, but sort of fell away from. In ToT, the hot bloodthirsty Mongol warlord Sasuke Sali Tayi is shown as actually starting to want to have some regard for the feelings of Generic Spunky Mongol Princess Heroine, but then shortly afterwards descends into the pit of Evil Villaindom with a vengeance, and it's gonna be damn hard to pull him up out of that even a little bit, his small sympathies for the heroine notwithstanding.