CWR WEEKEND BLOG EXTRA

Welcome back to an all-new BLOG EXTRA. This weekend, we dance into manga-land, with three books from DrMaster Books!

First up is KING OF FIGHTERS 2003, VOL.1, written and drawn by Wing Yan and King Tung, with translation by Ken Li and Stephen Ip. Like many videogame adaptations to comics, KING OF FIGHTERS has a number of hurdles to overcome. The game characters are never defined much beyond their screen abilities, so finding a way to make them compelling on the page and giving them a decent story to get involved in can be very difficult. The only thing you can truly count on is that the action sequences will be elaborate and energetic. Unfortunately, this book struggles to make the characters come to life, and spends most of its 128 pages setting up the story, meaning the plot doesn’t really get started, either. The book looks fantastic, and it’s quite possible that the second volume goes further in presenting a more rounded story and character arc, but this is just a little too slow. With manga, 128 story pages don’t always go far, and that’s what happens here.

SNK VS. CAPCOM: SVC CHAOS VOL.3 &5 is written and drawn by Chi Wan Shum and is translated by Yun Zhao and adapted by Ken Li. Another videogame-based book, SVC CHAOS plays as a much stronger book. You could consider this something like an inter-company crossover, as the casts of two games come together to fight it out here; like a traditional superhero match-up, the players are brought to an alternate world and forced to go into battle both together and separately. The characters get the setup they need, the action is handled well, and most importantly, there’s enough story built in to why the characters have been brought to the parallel world that your attention is solidly held. It isn’t rocket science, and these types of stories never are, but it does deliver precisely what it should deliver, and that makes all the difference. I’d take this over another meeting of G.I. JOE and the TRANSFORMERS any day.

That’s it for this week. I’ll be back during the week with site updates, and back next weekend with another CWR WEEKEND BLOG EXTRA!

/Mason