Other Side of the Mirror Vol. #01

By Greg Hackmann     February 14, 2008
Release Date: December 30, 2007



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Jo Chen
Translated by:J.Y. Standaert
Adapted by:Kereth Crowe-Spigai

What They Say
In the dismal backdrop of New York City, Southern-belle-turned-prostitute Sunny meets the college-educated Lou, who makes a living by out-drinking people at bars. What first starts as a night of drunken passion quickly spirals into unexpected love, as together they begin to search for meaning in a world that has all but deserted them...


The Review
Even though The Other Side of the Mirror retreads a lot of old clichés, it wins enough on style points to make it a decent read.

Packaging:

The cover artwork to The Other Side of the Mirror is impressive; on either side of the book, we get full-paged color paintings of Lou and Sunny. The coloring and detailing are beautifully done, and Tokyopop's coupled it with a nice glossy material that makes the colors really pop out. I usually don't give cover artwork much consideration, but I've got to admit that Tokyopop's done a good job to make The Other Side of the Mirror stand out.

Tokyopop has also included a noteworthy number of extras in this volume. The most significant extra is a standalone short called "99 Roses", which presents an interesting comedic twist on standard fairytale clichés. Chen also provides a one-page textual commentary on the The Other Side of the Mirror's backstory, a two-page interview about her work, and six pages of rough artwork drafts with margin notes.

Artwork:

The black-and-white artwork inside the covers isn't as elaborate as the color cover artwork; but it's fairly attractive nevertheless. Appropriately for a story set in New York City, the gangly character designs seem to have their roots more in American-style comics than in the prototypical "manga look". Sunny's facial expressions tend to look a little out-of-joint when her head's drawn at an angle, but the artwork is generally clean and consistent otherwise.

Her New York backdrops are particularly impressive: at their best, the details and shading in her depictions of street-level New York have an almost photorealistic quality. There's a strong sense of claustrophobia and chaos throughout the story, and it strengthens as the city closes in on Sunny and Lou. As usual, this sort of heavily-shaded artwork is pretty taxing on the mass-market printing process; black levels aren't always consistent from page to page, but no more so than in other books in this price range.

Text/SFX:

I admit that I tend to rag on Tokyopop for using illegible typefaces and for letting typographical errors slip into the finished translation -- but thankfully none of that's an issue here. The whole thing reads smoothly from start to finish, which is really all that I ask of a translation.

Chinese SFX are left untranslated. Signs are presented in English; since the story takes place in the United States, this is probably untouched from the original artwork.

Contents: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)

After a night of heavy drinking, twenty-something slacker Lou Schultz is given a literal rude awakening by the woman sleeping next to him in his run-down New York City apartment. He's insulted and hurt at first when the woman starts asking him for money; he didn't realize that she was a prostitute when he picked her up, and as a professional drinker he doesn't have anything to pay her with anyway. After realizing that she's no happier about the situation than he is, he shows a little bit of compassion and offers to at least let her live in the apartment for the time being.

When he returns from another (ahem) shift at work, he runs into the woman again as she's carrying a trash bag from his apartment. Though she meant to clean out his apartment as a gesture of goodwill, Lou finds the thought of a stranger pawing through his belongings downright repulsive, and so he kicks her out of the apartment after angrily shoving money into her hands. Nevertheless, he's touched enough by her act (and embarrassed enough by his reaction) to stick up for her when a john tries to skip out on payment, and again when she subsequently gets mugged for her earnings.

When this act of kindness lands him in the hospital, the woman is impressed enough by his courage and kindness to open up to him, introducing herself as Sunny Corrigan. The pair begin chatting as they fleeing the hospital to avoid the doctor's fees, leading Lou to discover that they have quite a bit in common. Lou and Sunny both naïvely headed for New York from their rural South Carolina homes and quickly burnt through their savings, Lou doing so in search of a more exciting life and Sunny in trying to escape from her abusive father. Sunny's story inspires Lou to finally put his life in New York behind him, and the two pool together their meager savings in a desperate attempt to get as far out of the state as possible and establish new lives.

Comments
Taken just in terms of plot, The Other Side of the Mirror doesn't break a lot of new ground; tales of naïve youth being crushed by the cogs of modern society have been around since at least the days of Dickens, and probably much earlier. I hate to make comparisons to the landmark film Midnight Cowboy -- I have no idea if Chen has even seen it -- but the similarities in their basic premises are especially striking, even if they aren't necessarily intentional. Both works involve pairs of idealistic rural twenty-somethings who come to New York in search of a better and more exciting lifestyle; and in both cases, they end up eaten alive by the city and forced into a life of poverty, homelessness, prostitution, and theft until they can finally scrape together enough cash to leave New York for greener pastures. Even if this resemblance is coincidental, it's pretty clear from the outset that Chen's story is cut from the same cloth as many other stories of societal alienation that have come before it.

The one new element that Chen brings to the standard "fish out of water" storyline is the romance angle, which I honestly don't have a good feel for quite yet. I really like that Chen presents this relationship in a mature light: Sunny and Lou sleep together, use and argue with each other, and generally just behave like real adults often do in serious relationships. This touch of realism is a nice bit of change from the overly idealistic and melodramatic high school romances presented in most manga that make it to American shores. On the downside, in Chen's zeal to make Lou embody the slacker lifestyle, she makes the couple a little too standoffish at first; although their transition from "just using each other" to "actually in love" is pretty much inevitable from the point where they first meet, it's still a little jarring when it happens.

Fortunately, Chen's stylistic and atmospheric execution makes up for many of the shortcomings in plot and characterization. Though it's sort of trite to talk about authors making New York City into a full-fledged character within their stories, it's really a fitting statement here. Within the span of just a few pages, we see New York as a bustling and shining metropolis as well as a seedy underbelly filled with crime, filth, and an uncaring populace. Because the cityscape plays such a heavy role in the story and atmosphere so far, it's all the more surprising to see Chen basically shift the focus of the story from New York as the volume heads into its last chapter. I'm not sure how well this change is going to play out in the next installment, but I'll at least give her that it's a daring move.

I think that The Other Side of the Mirror will sit well with readers looking for drama that's a little more low-key than your typical shonen/shoujo fare. Readers starved for josei manga (which is, at least as of this writing, rarely licensed for North American distribution) will especially appreciate what Chen's doing here, since this definitely feels targeted to the same kind of demographic.