Doctor Du Ming

This manga is all about subtle misdirection. It doesn't outright lie to you, but it tries to deceive you by careful omission and double-meanings. You can't even trust the synopsis, and you must pay attention to every panel and its possible double interpretations. Although, in contrast to fiction that is all about twists and turns of plot, nearly all the revelations in Doctor Du Ming are psychological ones. It's your understanding of the characters and their motivations that will shift drastically, and that would color the few important events in the manga in a different light. The art is distinctive and realistic, to the point where somepanels look almost rendered from pictures. It's not to my taste, but I'm sure a lot of people would appreciate it and find it refreshing. It's a character-driven manga, so I can't write much for them either without spoiling too much. I can say at least that the characters here are intriguing and believable, and that their secrets and complexities are revealed at a tantalizing, measured pace. The setting - a communist, highly patriarchal society is also consistent and realistic, and influences the characters' fate a great deal. I live in a post-communist country, and while I'm too young to have a personal experience of it, the manga seems scarily consistent with what older people have told me about it. I'm not sure if the setting will resonate the same way with Western-European or American readers, though, who might find it too removed from their own experiences. All that said, I can't say I enjoyed this manga, exactly. I respect it and I think it has great merit as a story, but the implications of the ending were too cynical for me. I prefer my psychological horror with a bit more hope. Overall, provided you like your fiction unflinchingly dark, and don't mind wracking your brain a bit to keep up with events, this is very much worth the read.

As far as I could gather, this manga is an adaptation of a Chinese novelette. And this fact of trivia is surprisingly relevant – you’d need to adjust your expectations accordingly to get the maximum enjoyment from this manga. What do I mean? Well: A novelette is limited in volume, its story won’t and can’t explain everything, and the story in this manga is highly schematic as well. But thankfully its length is proportionate to the adapted content, 15 chapters, a read for one night, so you’ll hardly have time to ponder over background details. Anyways - mind it, you’re reading more of a poem thana saga. A short literary work usually explores one idea and this manga is one-trick too, or, if we look at it positively, very focused. It is centered, as another reviewer aptly said, on misdirection – it changes the way we see the events in a series of well-calculated plot twists. Perception games are, probably, what you should read this manga for. It’s very literary. The flow of the narrative is non-linear, as most of the modern prose is (so keeping track of things can be difficult at times). But the payoff is that the quality of the text is on a very decent, non-amateurish level. The manga starts with a poetic love talk, and I expected it to devolve in the usual stifling swamp of pretentiousness, but the haughty confessions were balanced into something palatable with lifelike mundane interactions and gory medical topics. As far as for the art, the mangaka uses the interplay of semi-realistic detailed backgrounds and idealized main characters, especially the titular Du Ming, who is all fine chisel, white porcelain, huge black eyes and silky eyelashes (of course there’re gothic motives, see that Louis XIV sofa on the cover?). I also liked the less polished drawings on the covers of some of the chapters. The art may be not to everyone’s liking, but I find that it suits the story well. The story is dark, one of the darkest manga I’ve read, and I am not new to disturbing comics. It’s subtly uncomfortable, and while it has some artificial, forced bits it compensates for it by finding a psychological angle rarely explored. The most unnerving thing is that it doesn’t bother with morals at all, even in the form of the jolly teenage denial – it just paints a dark picture as an artistic exercise. Oh, and I have to disagree that this work has something inherently Chinese in it, I think the topics are universal. All in all, on its own merit I’d rate this manga with a 7 – it’s good, but the plot is not entirely clear (there’re at least two explanations among the readers), it’s short and not groundbreaking in any way. But I also can’t help but feel that it is a manga I will remember and reference for a long time, simply because there’re few works like it, and it understands the strengths and limitations of its format well. So – an 8.

The thing that brings this manga down is the 'hazy' story; it's sort of a go-nowhere kind of plot and it can get confusing and vague. The characters weren't fleshed out enough, especially the main character, which was a pity. Well thats an understatement, I was actually really disappointed with the character development of the main character. There were these little hints scattered in the story that made you realise he has a darker, more complex personality and you just want to find out what he's really thinking. But the author tells the story like how you would describe a memory that you can't reallyremember; by just skimming the surface: gets you interested and thinking, but doesn't go into details to satisfy your curiosity. In a way, I guess it suits the manga since that would help in keeping the mysterious feel of the story. But overall, it was enjoyable. The artwork was amazing; everything was well-drawn. Despite what I mentioned earlier about the story, it's still good. It was interesting, definitely, and it draws you in. If you like dark psychological stories with good art, it's worth giving this a try.