It's another Manhwa Mondays and this week, I'll be talking about the supernatural/horror action series JACK FROST by JinHo Ko.
JinHo Ko, you may remember, was the artist of CROQUIS POP, a comic I talked about a few weeks ago. Here, he takes both writer and artist chairs to lead us on a wild and winding ride.
The series begins with Noh-A Joo, a high school student, starting her first day at a brand-new school - Amityville High. How she got there, why she is starting a new school, and other pertinent details have escaped her, though, and she notices right off the bat that something isn't right. For one thing, all of the students are identical except for a creepy guy in the back (the titular Jack Frost, she later learns, although she calls him "Nasty Smile" for the first few volumes; you can see why from the cover image above). Before she has any time to ponder these things, though, the classroom is attacked by an intruder and Jack Frost leaps to the fray, destroying all of the student puppets and most of the classroom, and kicking off the first of many battles in the series.
Eventually, Noh-A learns that Amityville is a sort of cosmic purgatory for people who have been kicked out of the karmic cycle, people who can neither ascend to heaven nor descend to hell, but will also never be reincarnated. These souls have been damned to spend all of eternity in Amityville - unless they are killed there, in which case they simply cease to be, their souls utterly snuffed out. Amityville, which is the size of a small European country one of the faculty claims, is divided into multiple districts that are constantly at war with each other, seeking control of the entire school, so being erased is a real possibility. Especially as the strongest souls there, such as Jack Frost, have superhuman abilities while the average soul is just as fragile as it was in life.
Noh-A Joo, though, is relatively safe as she also has a superhuman ability - she literally cannot die, as evidenced by the early running joke of her being decapitated constantly. This, she learns, is because she is the Mirror Image, the living link between Amityville and the real world. And what exactly does that mean? Well, that's the focus of the early volumes as people war over her, trying to gain her power to gain full control over Amityville, while she tries to learn what that power is, exactly.
The early volumes of the series are full of elaborate, high-energy battles between characters that resemble various classic horror figures and monsters (Jack Frost's rival, for example, is Jack the Ripper, a specialist with knives who has superhuman speed and agility; another, Hansen, is clearly a riff on Ivan Isaacs, the main character of famous horror/action manhwa PRIEST) and becomes more complex, although sometimes confusingly so. Around halfway through the series, in volume 5 or 6 (there are 11 total), though, a major shift occurs when the focus moves to the past and Noh-A Joo's father becomes the main character. We learn quite a bit about the origin of the Mirror Image and Amityville itself, but the "side story" drags out nearly as long as the first half of the series, almost until the comic's end. By the time Ko shifted back to his main characters/story, it had been literally years during the comic's original publication since he had written or drawn the original characters and it seems as if he lost touch with them. When we do finally shift back to Noh-A and Jack Frost, they feel, sound and even look different... and then the series swiftly ends.
Don't get me wrong. The story is light on over-all cohesiveness, but the individual segments of the story are mostly pretty enjoyable. JinHo Ko's art is fantastic throughout the series, too, although the redesign of the main characters in the last volume wasn't to my taste. It wasn't even a redesign so much as he just had to relearn how to draw them and they came out looking quite different.
Overall, though, I enjoyed this comic a lot. I think if were to be animated, with a series architect to give the individual pieces a better framework, it might make a great series. As a comic? It was still pretty good.
The series begins with Noh-A Joo, a high school student, starting her first day at a brand-new school - Amityville High. How she got there, why she is starting a new school, and other pertinent details have escaped her, though, and she notices right off the bat that something isn't right. For one thing, all of the students are identical except for a creepy guy in the back (the titular Jack Frost, she later learns, although she calls him "Nasty Smile" for the first few volumes; you can see why from the cover image above). Before she has any time to ponder these things, though, the classroom is attacked by an intruder and Jack Frost leaps to the fray, destroying all of the student puppets and most of the classroom, and kicking off the first of many battles in the series.
Eventually, Noh-A learns that Amityville is a sort of cosmic purgatory for people who have been kicked out of the karmic cycle, people who can neither ascend to heaven nor descend to hell, but will also never be reincarnated. These souls have been damned to spend all of eternity in Amityville - unless they are killed there, in which case they simply cease to be, their souls utterly snuffed out. Amityville, which is the size of a small European country one of the faculty claims, is divided into multiple districts that are constantly at war with each other, seeking control of the entire school, so being erased is a real possibility. Especially as the strongest souls there, such as Jack Frost, have superhuman abilities while the average soul is just as fragile as it was in life.
Noh-A Joo, though, is relatively safe as she also has a superhuman ability - she literally cannot die, as evidenced by the early running joke of her being decapitated constantly. This, she learns, is because she is the Mirror Image, the living link between Amityville and the real world. And what exactly does that mean? Well, that's the focus of the early volumes as people war over her, trying to gain her power to gain full control over Amityville, while she tries to learn what that power is, exactly.
The early volumes of the series are full of elaborate, high-energy battles between characters that resemble various classic horror figures and monsters (Jack Frost's rival, for example, is Jack the Ripper, a specialist with knives who has superhuman speed and agility; another, Hansen, is clearly a riff on Ivan Isaacs, the main character of famous horror/action manhwa PRIEST) and becomes more complex, although sometimes confusingly so. Around halfway through the series, in volume 5 or 6 (there are 11 total), though, a major shift occurs when the focus moves to the past and Noh-A Joo's father becomes the main character. We learn quite a bit about the origin of the Mirror Image and Amityville itself, but the "side story" drags out nearly as long as the first half of the series, almost until the comic's end. By the time Ko shifted back to his main characters/story, it had been literally years during the comic's original publication since he had written or drawn the original characters and it seems as if he lost touch with them. When we do finally shift back to Noh-A and Jack Frost, they feel, sound and even look different... and then the series swiftly ends.
Don't get me wrong. The story is light on over-all cohesiveness, but the individual segments of the story are mostly pretty enjoyable. JinHo Ko's art is fantastic throughout the series, too, although the redesign of the main characters in the last volume wasn't to my taste. It wasn't even a redesign so much as he just had to relearn how to draw them and they came out looking quite different.
Overall, though, I enjoyed this comic a lot. I think if were to be animated, with a series architect to give the individual pieces a better framework, it might make a great series. As a comic? It was still pretty good.
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