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The Webcomics Weekly #170: A Fake Straylight Tiger (1/25/2022 Edition)

By | January 25th, 2022
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life. And this week it isn’t “A Fake Affair” it is the real deal, with continuing coverage of “Lavender Jack” as well as “Straylight Tiger”.

A Fake Affair
Episodes 0-6
Updates: Daily (Completed)
By Akiko Higashimura
Reviewed by Elias Rosner

Do you like romance NOT set in an office or high school? Do you love messy protagonists getting stuck in increasingly absurd but never unbelievable situations? Do you love adorable talking head bumps chastising you for pretending to be married and then getting roped into an “affair?” Then do I have the manga…Webtoon….COMIC for you. Created by Akiko Higashimura, of “Princess Jellyfish,” “Blank Canvas” and “Tokyo Tarareba Girls” fame, “A Fake Affair” is a simple tale of girl meets boy, only the girl is an unemployed 30 year old hot mess and the boy is a 25 year old Korean photographer who suspiciously into having an affair with this woman he met on a plane flight to Seoul. Fans of Higashimura’s other works will find themselves right at home with “A Fake Affair.”

My first thought on reading these opening chapters was how similar Shoko was to Rinko from “Tokyo Tarareba Girls.” She’s got all the hallmarks: an over-the-top personality, insecurities manifesting within her mind as punny objects in their lives, romantic tension based not on will-they-won’t-they but on “who’s hiding what and when will this come to a head,” and a terrible grasp of how to start or be in a relationship. However, that’s only because Higashimura is working with a similar archetype to explore a different form of romantic struggle. The intrigue and drama comes from Shoko’s lie, and the increasingly deep hole she has to dig to sell it, but also from questions Higashimura is seeding about Jobanni and the desire we have to see Shoko grow and reckon with her lie.

New readers may be put off at first by the sparsity of Higashimura’s panels. I even thought at first that she had originally drawn this for a traditional manga page in black & white that was then colored and chopped up. However, this was how it was meant to be and it clearly took Higashimura a few episodes to really get the format down. The prologue and first episode suffers the most, with her characters floating in empty blue or off-white voids while faint, flat colors hint at the visuals of everything else. By episode six, though, I was no longer feeling the tension between the format and the story.

It’s not quite perfect, to be sure. The pacing feels glacial because of the panel to panel distance and decompression of the story and backgrounds still feel empty whenever solid colors are used, but the world feels full and the character work has done more than enough to keep me going. Higashimura has always excelled at this aspect, imbuing all her characters with an internality that is apparent through her art and writing, even when we see little or learn little of them.

While all we get in these opening six chapters of Jobanni are his smooth advances on Shoko and fun banter between him and his sister, it’s clear he’s full of secrets and motives beyond “romantic foil to Shoko.” His posing, the looks he has, and even his questions give us glimpses but never more than that. It’s tantalizing and puts us in the same position as our protagonist, though hopefully with less of a freak-out brain. Did I also mention the series is funny? Maybe not as gut-busting as her other series but it got a solid laugh out of me more than once during these chapters.

Do note, however, that any chapter past 5 is only available through the app and you are restricted to one new chapter every day only as you redeem the previous chapter. You can also buy them with coins. I think you can read it on the site via your account if you purchase the chapters? I haven’t checked. Anyway, anyone who’s looking for a josei romance series that isn’t TOO serious should definitely read “A Fake Affair.” It’s funny, has a great hook, and is by one of the premier modern rom-com comics creators. What’s not to love?

Continued below

Lavender Jack
Episodes 94-95
Schedule: Tuesdays
By Dan Schkade(writing and art), Jenn Manley Lee(color)
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane

And so, the first act of this third season, ‘The Last of the Bastrops,’ comes to a satisfying close. After all this time apart our core cast is reunited, with the most adorable appearance of Requin yet, as Dan Schkade and Jenn Manley Lee execute an escape out of an old adventure serial. This moment of convergence is at once inevitable and yet I didn’t see it coming.

When I first started reviewing this strip, I was often taken aback by two features. First was Schkade’s composition in terms of using the vertical strip format to effect action and choreography (in particular just strong use of angles). Second was his character designs and their emotive ability, his designs are often not minimalist but not super worked over and textured. That was then, this and Captain Coster are now. Coster looks positively Gary Frank-esque with how square jawed – square everything – he is and all those scars. Frank tends to use a lot of vertical lines and hashing in his work, Schkade even for all the blockeyness still creates lines on the grizzled Captains face. Coster is likely not going to be that important. (Watch him turn out to be Faux-Jack.) But his design makes him more than a nothing character. There is a sense of history, is he one of those “kill happy” reprobates that man this fort at Gallery’s Elbow? He’s just a good example of how cool character design can push a functional character into a place of wanting more.

The escape is lively with some fun use of playing to gender stereotypes in this sort of scenario for Ducky, all according to her plan, as she acquires what will hopefully be the new Lavender Jack mobile after a tune up and paint job. The whole escape sequence had an air of Indiana Jones, but what if he was actually as in control and bad ass as fans think he is.

The setting of Catspaw Keep is very dull, lots of grays and beige colors. The uniforms are all dark blue and maroons. Which makes the moment of total gun fire and later explosions just POP when Manley Lee hammers in the orange, yellows, and reds for their panels. It breaks up the visual dynamics of the strip and wakes things up. It’s a small but very effective moment in an overall solid end to this opening act.

Straylight Tiger
Episodes 1-5
Updates every other Wednesday
By flying-frappe
Reviewed by Mel Lake

Making the jump from Canvas to a Webtoon Original, Straylight Tiger introduces us to a world where humans can either use magic, shapeshift into animals, or be, well, regular humans. It’s like a mashup between Beastars and Madoka Magica with a side of Tron. The prologue introduces us to the conflict between the three races, with shapeshifters called simply “shifters,” magic users called “enduring,” and mortals who use weapons made of “illuminite” against the magical races and who have walled themselves off in their own city to protect themselves. There’s a lot of complicated worldbuilding in this series and although the inconsistency of the verb form “enduring” being used as a label bugs the heck out of me, having the shifters and mortals called shifters and mortals makes things easy to understand.

We’re plopped into the world with Angeline as our POV character, and of course, she’s a new recruit to Cryptopia University. And of course, it’s her first time visiting the city. And of course, her big brother, whom she literally calls “big bro” worries about her and gives her some token items to protect her from the dangers of the city. Dangers that Angeline falls prey to immediately, of course. I say of course because all of these elements are just so predictable and rote that they are basically ticking off “character intro 101” boxes. The dialogue is as flat as the dialogue you click through at the beginning of a video game tutorial. But what makes Straylight Tiger worth keeping an eye on for future story development is the excellent artwork. The cityscapes are really cool-looking and I love the design of the train that takes Angeline to the city. The artist packs in a ton of action sequences, too, and while sometimes it can be hard to tell what’s going on, the bright colors and detailed character designs are great fun to scroll through.

At the end of episode five, our protagonist has just had some type of power awakened in her but it’s not clear if she’s a shifter or some kind of hybrid between all three races. It’s too early to tell where the story might go but the nifty-looking anime-inspired designs and the complex-but-interesting world make Straylight Tiger worth keeping an eye on as it develops.


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