Customer Reviews
Fine literature, but suffer from adaptation problem
Okay, if you have read the other review, let me de-cloud your doubt. Horizon Line is one of the Ikue Ishida's earlier work, and one of my favorite mangas of all time, and the reason is: it's a fine literary piece, but not an eye candy book.
The problem of this eBook edition is the translation and technical adaptation. The prior is understandable, because Ishida's plot is very complex and very hard to understand, so it's very difficult to translate into English. Ishida's work is also (to me anyways) hard to know who is who in the story, which only complicates the problem.
Despite of that, once you've gone through the book the second time around and figured out people's relationship, you would be surprised with Ishida's ability to describe fragile and often contradictory feelings in a male/male relationship.
The artwork of Ishida is not very pretty. Her later work is better on that field, but still not on par with most mangakas, but unless you are really looking for eye candies, you shouldn't be bothered by it. You don't read Ishida's work for eye candies, but for plots.
The eBook adaptation is not the highest of all quality, but it's cheap so use it to get a taste of her work. I am very sorry there isn't a printed version of the manga in English.
Bottom line: Ishida's work is worth collecting because it's literature.
Poor quality
First of all, this manga is supposed to be an YAOI or a shounen-ai manga. So, if you are not interested in the genre, please do not bother to read it.
The book is a collection of short stories. It is an implicit YAOI book. That means there is no explicit bedroom scenes although it is rated 17+.
YAOI mangas should be the mangas drawn by women for female readers with woman's fantasies on beautiful men and their relationships with other men.
TWO particular characteristics of YAOI are "beautiful men" and the emotions brought up by the relationships.
In this collection, the drawings are OK, but not great. The images look ... OK, but not "beautiful" on either way. The characters are not girly enought such as CLAMP's, or manly enough such as Kazuma Kodata sensei's.
The main problem is that there are no good plots at all. Therefore the stories are lacking of emotions (the stories cannot bring out eitehr tears or laughs. You may say "nuts" after reading each one of them as I did). Some conversations do not make sense. All stories are lukewarm.
Anyway, I am unable to spoil the stories even I want to. That is how the collection is about. Can I treat it as a good drawing collection? Not really.
Perhaps, the collection is only the mangaka's exercise pieces?
Also, the translations are not precise. There are many grammer or typo errors. It may be another reason that causes the book upgraded.
When I mentioned "exercise", I think the whole e-book stuff can be a painful exercise for all non-technical people. This is my first real e-book (commercially purchased). After much troubled exercise behind a firewall with a not very fast connection, I finally got all neccessary components set up and finally got the book downloaded after several tries. BUT, I did not really enjoy this "graphic short story collection"!!! You can see how frustrated I am now.
