Pine Kiss

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a couple of new manwha titles, Pine Kiss and The Land of Silver Rain, published by Net Comics (a new publisher, I think?). I've been feeling I should try to correct my complete ignorance about Korean comics, and these looked appealing enough. They've been sitting in my giant stack o' manga since then, and I only yesterday got to the first one.

Alas. Pine Kiss is craaaaaaaaaaaap. The translation is almost unreadable. It's at the level of a bad scanlation--one of those translations shooting for as much literalism as possible, with no regards for the sound, feel, or comprehensibility in the new language.

Here's a sample: Sebin, daughter of a powerful gang leader, is being driven to school by one of her father's flunkies.


Flunky: (swearing at an ambulance with its siren on) F#&king hell! Retards...Pulling them babies out at this time in the morning. On this pea sized land, we don't even have enough space to walk around. D%ckheads! F#&ckers!

Sebin: Don't come to work, starting tomorrow.

Flunky: Ha! I'm sorry...this crazy mouth did it again...don't tell boss, I mean, your father! I'll get killed. How dare I say things like "hell" and "f#&k in front of you...Ha! I'm so...sorry! ...but to Boss...no, to your father...

Sebin: Shut your mouth! (thinking to herself) Stinks...a title that reveals his background...it's nauseating!



And it it were a scanlation, I wouldn't complain, whether or not I chose to read it, but it's not. It's a commercial release, and this is not an acceptable level of work for a ten-dollar book. This without a doubt, the worst screw-up I've seen by a publisher in this field, worse than that bizarre, untranslated panel in Tactics, or Tokyopop's hit-or-miss approach to translating sound effects. I would not touch Net Comics with a ten foot pole, after this.

I've never returned a book in my life, but I'm seriously thinking taking these back in and and exchanging them. I don't think I can bring myself to slog through the rest of even Pine Kiss, much less take on Land of Silver Rain, I don't want to keep them, and I can't imagine who could possibly want them.


That said, if anybody on my flist is interested in reading badly translated Korean comics about mafia princesses and Korean fairy tales, drop me a line; they're yours for free.

food isn't love, but manwha still is

Food is still bleah. I haven't been able to eat anything without feeling ill for a couple of days, actually--I'm not sure if I've got a touch of something, or if this is some new stress reaction. I do occasionally become nauseated when I'm really nervous or upset about something, and heaven knows, contemplating switching jobs makes me nervous, but still, it seems a little excessive for it to last for days.


Being introduced to They, Too, Love is more than adequate recompense for the disappointment of Pine Kiss, by the way*. Thank you, octopedingenue! It is like the mutated love child of Kare Kano and Land of the Blindfolded, and therefore a sublime joy.

*I have been attempting to push through Pine Kiss, and the salt in the wound is that it's very, very pretty, very much in the shoujo vein, and probably something I would like quite a lot if reading it wasn't a constant battle to glean both meaning and delicacy from the awful translation. The art is very strong where the translation is weak. Possibly, I would be happier with it if I took a bottle of white-out to it.