With more people reading manga and webtoons (aka vertical scroll comics) than ever before, Beat’s Bizarre Adventure gives three writers an opportunity each week to recommend some of their favorite books and series from Japan, Korea, and elsewhere. This week we have revenge, penguin detectives, and, of course, mercury poisoning.
Bloom From Mistake
Writer/Artist: LynkGe Studio/Snap Studio
Platform: WebComics
I was browsing through WebComics and stumbled across a Boys’ Love manhua called Bloom From Mistake. The cover wasn’t particularly eye-catching—a white-haired young man staring seductively at the fans as his other hand curls around a black-haired blindfolded man, his fingers in his mouth. It looked like any other ordinary BL and I wasn’t going to start reading it until I read through the synopsis and was immediately hooked.
The story takes us into the revenge scheme of Sylvan Frost, whose whirlwind romance with Yanny Moore, the heir of a gang, leads him to lose everything. Burning with rage and a thirst to see Yanny fall into the same hell that he just crawled out of, Sylvan is determined to make Yanny pay. Bloom From Mistake opens with Sylvan and Yanny’s reunion after they broke up before it immediately goes back three years to when their tangled relationship began. Sylvan is making ends meet, taking odd jobs here and there while serving as a stand-in student for his friend at law school so he can not only earn a law degree but also earn some more money to take care of his sick mother. What he thinks is a chance encounter with Yanny Moore, who appears to be a bumbling lovesick puppy, turns out to be a part in Yanny’s own revenge scheme–with Sylvan is his pawn.
I love it when both characters are on equal standing in terms of intelligence and think they can outsmart the other. When it comes to romance, there seems to be a penchant for making one character a fool so the other character can swoop in and save them from themselves. That’s not the case with the main characters in this manhua. Sylvan doesn’t buy into Yanny’s loverboy persona at all, and uses his own resources to dig into Yanny’s identity. Yanny knows that Sylvan is highly intelligent, and matches it by being not just two steps but ten steps ahead. The artist depicts their conflicting feelings perfectly. Even though Sylvan doesn’t trust Yanny, there’s a small part of him that wants to believe he is who he says he is. And Yanny is wrestling with his desire for Sylvan and his need to finally get payback against the man who hurt him.
While there are only twenty-two chapters out so far, with such a strong premise and start, I recommend that BL/danmei lovers (especially those who love enemies-to-lovers tropes) read Bloom From Mistake. — Hilary Leung
ReMaster Monk
Writer/Artist: Leviathan
Platform: WEBTOON CANVAS
Halo: Reach was released 16 years ago at the peak of Halo’s popularity. Back then, as a freshman in high school and a big fan of the series, I stumbled on Halo: Fistful of Arrows, a beautifully illustrated tie-in comic centered on Noble Team member Jun after the events of the in-game mission “The Package”. Many fans consider it canon.
Why am I bringing this up, you might ask? Well, the talented artist behind that comic, Levi Hoffmei (a.k.a. Leviathan), has his own original comic series ReMaster Monk available to read on WEBTOON CANVAS. It follows the wannabe samurai Tycho, the talking penguin detective Phlop, and the anthropomorphic spiritual-advisor bear Waylon. This group of misfits navigates a bizarre fantasy world of giant CDs, whale-people, and spiraling mountains. Meanwhile, a sinister marketing agency known as the ReMaster corporation plucks towns from the ground.
As of writing, there are only 8 episodes, mostly due to Levi’s involvement in multiple other projects. But ReMaster Monk is without a doubt their passion project. Their art has evolved from the days of Fistful of Arrows with a beautiful sketched style bolstered by digital painting techniques. Levi especially shines in their use of grayscale and tones. While ReMaster Monk is mostly a grayscale webtoon, everything is rendered with intent and care. The influence of Frazetta’s sketches is counterbalanced by Levi’s own style.
If this story sounds like your cup o’ joe, give it a read! Leviathan states that he intends to continue this series, so there is plenty of time to catch up. Until next time, birb nerds! — Justin Guerrero
The Minamata Story: An Ecotragedy
Writer: Seán Michael Wilson
Artist: Akiko Shimojima
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
While not a manga in the “truest” sense of the term, The Minamata Story: An Ecotragedy covers a real and important historical event in Japan. The artist Akiko Shimojima is also a manga artist in her own right.
The Minamata Story: An Ecotragedy follows half-British, half-Japanese college student Tomi as he writes a report about Minamata Disease: a condition afflicting the local population of Minamata due to severe mercury poisoning. This disaster was caused by the corporation Chisso polluting the waterways of that area with chemical pollution.
Tomi and his grandmother Mrs. Sawada visit Minamata to gather information. It’s also an opportunity for Sawada to revisit her hometown. There she and Tomi meet living patients of Minamata Disease. those who take care of them, and those who lived through the devastation but did not suffer from the disease themselves. Through flashbacks we see what life was like back then for human and animal victims, the prejudices many of them faced, and how life abruptly changed for everyone living in the area.
There aren’t many books out there I have read that made me cry. This was one of them. While Shimojima’s art is deviously innocent-looking, and Wilson‘s dialogue can feel very overtly positive and non-confrontational, these choices drive home the horrors that thousands of real people have lived with for decades.
Just reading the short biographies of some of the real people the characters in this work are based on had me choking up. Particularly the cats with their “dancing disease” caused by mercury poisoning. Reading about this while my own cats lay near me was enough to put a deep grimace on my face. As I’ve learned more about global histories throughout my adult life it never gets easier to know what very real horrors man has unleashed upon the Earth, much of it in the name of capitalism and political identity. This is but another reminder.
As Wilson and Shimojima remind us within The Minamata Story, though, it doesn’t have to be like this. Future generations must continue fighting for a better world. Only by fighting back can we keep tragedies like this from happening again. It is, in the end, up to us. — Derrick Crow
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