Mijeong by Byun Byung-Jun

English Title: Mijeong (LT)

Original Title: 미정

Author: Byun Byung-Jun

Artist: Byun Byung-Jun

Series?: Nope.

Basic Reason for Beginning: It sounded interesting. Skip down to the blurb, you’ll see.

Basic Reason for Finishing: It… is a fast read and, you know, fairly expensive. Least I can do is finish it before passing it on.

Blurb: From the back: In Chinese ‘Mijeong’ means ‘pure beauty’. In the cold city, young people’s lives cross and spark for brief moments in this remarkably drawn graphic novel: Wounded characters, squashed by the daily hard realities of urban living seeing their destinies take sudden unannounced turns but their inner flames shine bright and wild, even for a brief time. From the girl who deals sensitively with an older man obsessed by youth to the group of friends who find their friend has committed suicide but feel they might get implicated, this engrossing collection of stories will transfix and move you deeply.

Book Rereadability: I think… I really should read this a few times, but I don’t want to. Me and this book, we didn’t get along.

Author Rereadability: And I think the artist’s style and I don’t get on. I’ll get to that in the bulk of the review, don’t worry.

Recommendation: If, by chance, you’re looking for some global reads, this Korean collection of short stories will surely do the trick. (Unless, probably, you happen to live in Korea, or happen to consider it as Dutch as my secondary school considers Flemish novels to be.) If you like some gritty stories about life in an urban city, you might want to give this a spin too. But you might want to skip it if you’re not into expressionistic art.

Pages: 240

ISBN: 9781561635542

Challenges: None.

Thoughts, Burbles, Etc

Noooooot my book! You all know – or if you don’t, you know now – I’m not a visual person. This story collection relies a lot on its visuals to tell the stories. Add in the sketchy less-than-clear style the artist uses and, well, I floundered my way through most of these stories. That’s why I think a reread would be a good idea – I might follow the stories along better, but I wasn’t drawn into any of the stories enough to want to try. (It doesn’t help that some of the stories flow into one another – or seem to – and it’s hard to tell whether the page you’re watching sets you up for the next story (the title is often on the next page) or belongs to the previous story as a sort of epilogue. It gives the whole a kind of dreamlike, distanced feel that the artist may well have wanted to go for, but… It’s done very little except confuse me and convince me that I really shouldn’t be reading graphic novels. I suck.

(You can view some of the artist’s artwork here. Just pick a link and click. (Find 229 and imagine it in grey-scale. Or just imagine any of the sketches with more detail to them. Or just go here for some preview pages by the English publisher.)

That’s the kind of art to expect in this and, probably, the biggest reason I had so many problems with it. Because it is hard to tell the story from those pictures. I had to read one scene in them three times before I finally ‘got’ what I was supposed to see and I still don’t see it. All the faces just… blended into one another. Even in the one colour story in here.

Makes me sad. I’d been looking forward to this little thing so much. And… All I’m left with is the question whether the writer of that blurb and I were even reading the same stories. That’s not to say that the stories in this are bad. To be honest, I’m too befuddled by figuring out what went on to make a decent judgment call, but… Did not connect to them. At all. *sad noise*

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