Yun Mi-Kyung - Bride of the Water God, vol. 01 (Eng. trans.)

[oyceter]

Soah's village sacrifices her to be the bride of the water god Habaek for much-needed rain. When Soah wakes up after the ceremony, she finds she's in a different land with floating islands and the young child king. She doesn't realize that Habaek has a secret, though.

Now that I think about it, not much happens in volume one. On the other hand, I don't care because the art? It is gorgeous. Check out pages on Amazon. The entire volume is like that, and even if there had been much plot, I probably wouldn't have noticed among the gorgeous swirly hair, the costumes, and the landscapes.

That said, I do actually like the characters so far, and I particularly love that it’s a take on the usual animal bridegroom/Cupid and Psyche/Beauty and the Beast type story, which I’ve always been a sucker for. And I want to know if the older woman who comes in later is the Queen Mother of the West (Xi Wangmu) from Chinese mythology, since the Korean name sounds vaguely familiar. On the other hand, I could be completely making that up!

Also, now I want to know how much of the mythology the author is creating and how much is taken from traditional sources and what she’s doing to them. This goes a little back to my thing about common knowledge; one of the reasons why I’m so sad that Chinese mythology and story and legend isn’t as well known is because this means I get less stuff in English riffing off of it. Like most people, I learned the basic mythology of my culture via adaptations, not from the original source. Anyway, brief digression to note that I wish I knew more Korean mythology.

So far, I very much like this. Also, did I mention how gorgeous it is?

Comments

[larryhammer]

It's one of the few works where the gorgeousness makes me not care about other problems -- pretty art alone rarely pulls something for me. Though those characters might also distract me on their own.

And, yeah, the root story is one that works for me.

---L.

[oyceter]

Yes, definitely! I usually can't do plain pretty art if the story's completely incoherent, though I will actually sit through a lot of incomprehensible plot for pretty art (see: early volumes of Tsubasa and xxxHolic). I'm hoping this quickly veers into awesomesauce territory, as Tsubasa and xxxHolic did.