Sunday Revue August 23: This Mortal Coil

Ladies And Gentlemen! Boys And Girls!

                  From The Mysterious Orient,

                                 We Present To You!

Between the mundane and the divine, time can curl and twine like an unwound red ribbon. Thousand-year ancient tales can happen tomorrow. And things are rarely as you expect them to see; good and evil are simply a matter of perspective, from the right vantage point.

But when gods become involved with the mortal world, things can go wrong. 'This Mortal Coil' is a tale that explores the myriad ways gods and men can wound one another. A tale by Glenn Song, this work unfolds all its complexities at this link

This story is much like a beautiful Chinese silk painting; there are a thousand details, but they all weave together into a beautiful and cohesive whole. At its heart, it is the tale of revenge, redemption, and a girl with the strength to become a god.

The Rating

A fascinating, funny, intricate and uplifting tale.

The Raves

From the very first page, the artwork will grab your attention. In an innovative blending of  woodcut style and much more modern Anime artistic conventions, the creator forms a world that feels timeless and yet accessible. The bold, simplistic palette of black, white and red is powerfully employed. Not a line nor a jot of color is wasted, and the eye is constantly entertained by the stark contrasts  and the well-deployed textures that seem to hark back to a calligrapher's pen or brush. The later introduction of flash animation to chosen strips only enhances the immediacy of the art and adds to its appeal.

The storytelling meshes perfectly with the art: timeless, direct and yet layered with intertwined lives and hidden complexities, only fully grasped as the tale unfolds at the pace of a classic folk tale. There are adorning moments of comic relief, light-hearted sibling banter and occasional repartee, but they don't distract from the core of the story, which has the taste of ancient tale about it. A lovely blending of fairytale and modern storytelling, 'Coil' gives us characters to love, hate and learn from with simplicity and grace. The characters are fleshed out with every economical scripting choice in dialogue and action, giving you strong characters with very little need for explanation.  Even the site design is an act of simple grace, easy to navigate  and informative while remaining diffident to the reading experience that it's meant to support.

The Razzes

My only complaint is the occasional awkwardness in the meshing of styles seen in this work. At times the anime emotional intensifiers look very out of place, and there are scenes where so little line is used that the art has an oddly overexposed quality, giving the look of a piece of calligraphy that was photocopied. Most of the time that works...but sometimes the eye boggles trying to pick out the structure of individual characters or objects, and this distracts from the smooth reading of the story. I'd like to see things made just a touch easier for the eye of the reader to pick out.

The Revue

A must read for all fans of mythology and plain good storytelling.