All PostsA friend of mine was in Vietnam and brought me back a Vietnamese comic. Well, it’s a Koran manwha translated into Vietnamese. Oddly enough the back cover has the credits in English. Nothing else in the whole book is in English except the back cover credits, which I find rather odd. Anyway it’s EQ Biography Series: Abraham Lincoln by Nam-Kin Kim (writer) and Bok-Yong Kim (cartoonist) from 1998. The first 50 pages are in color, which is interesting in itself as opposed to the Japanese style of having the first few pages of a chapter in color (sadly, these are usually gray-scaled for English translations).
It’s a book for kids with a light style, lots of over-the-top emotions (based solely on expressions) and short, round-headed characters. I doubt there’s a lot of nuance to the story. The Civil War seems to end rather quickly. Nothing in particular in the art struck me, except at the very end, were Lincoln is assassinated. He is at the theater and John Wilkes Booth sneaks up behind him. Big sound effect panel. You turn the page and…
Damn! That’s a sudden turn to a rather harrowing image. The blackened out top half of his face is particularly effective in making him look ghostly. This is followed by a deathbed image and then a page with some kind of funeral speech and summing up. Story over.
I just thought I’d share that.