Running on Empty

Yes, this is the first time I say 'there isn't really room for improvement'. Hence the 10's. The story is truly wonderful. Two young men dealing with hideous life events that 'happen' to cross paths. Afterwhich a journey both literal and esoteric begins for each. Two ppl finding themselves while learning slowly about each other. The art for me was a first time experiance. It was the most interesting blend of actual photographs and hand drawn images, mixed with every degree of combining the two. The color of the hand drawn to me brought a vividness of events and the characters that made them standout wonderfully, while the true photo's grounded me in solid reality making the out of the norm aspects of the story all the more real feeling. Not to mention the bonus aspect that it was ENTIRELY done in color! The characters were just real for me. The truth is I have know ppl similar to the leads. They were not too overblown despite what some might think. The characters were kept as simple as possible otherwise the manga would have been endless, LOL. I enjoyed this manga imensely. A huge note to anyone who shies away from shounen ai. In this case DON'T. Holding hands is the most 'boys love they show' ... not including a non sexual nude scene. This manga is about understanding people... not 'finding love' so to speak. Ever wondered about shounen Ai... this is a great safe way to start. It is also just a damn great manga to read - period. ^^

'Running on Empty' has been quite a mixed bag. On one hand, it's almost a decent manhwa, both in the story and in the characters. On the other hand, the dreadful art makes it impossible for me to give it any sort of positive score. Both the story and the characters were nothing exceptional. Fortunately, they weren't utterly terrible either (most of them at least). So, I'm not gonna say anything about them beyond "they were bearable". Let's talk about the terrible art: In Korean manhwa, the artists often take real-life locations and re-draw simplified versions in their works. This author goes beyond that and uses real-life picturesas her background art. They are blurred so that they won't look completely out of place, but any normal human being with decent eyesight can tell that the background "art" are just blurred pictures. When she isn't using pictures as background art, she uses some ugly grey or orange color to smudge things up, and sometimes there's no background art at all. There were also a couple of "action" scenes that were terribly drawn. The author again used blur to indicate the motion of the characters, and it was not pretty. A guy was throwing a punch, and his entire body was a fucking blur. It doesn't make sense. I didn't like the main protagonist, Han. He cried about how his father ruined his life but didn't consider how he acted like an edgy 12-year-old when people started talking behind his back, and instead of trying to move on or fix things, he just stayed quiet. Even when someone finally approached him with good intentions, he lashed out like the true, depressed emo boy that he was. I also didn't like how everything was resolved. They arrested Lee, but he was free in the last chapter because the real criminal suddenly "confessed after some time". Like, what the hell does that supposed to mean? How did that fucking happen? Some kind of explanation beyond a "confessed after some time" would've been nice. In the end, it is not worth it. It was decent enough that I kept reading till the end, but there are better shounen ai manhwa and manga out there, with better art and better stories. Go read those.