Oldman

I love short stories, don't get me wrong, but this one really needed some more time in the oven. While it isn't, “Oldman” feels like an author debut. A mix of ideas that definitely work, that lend a story that's interesting with characters you understand, but not one that's fleshed out. Starting with the world. Beautiful idea of an old-timey, medieval period, with some speculative science. Characters ridden with war, king duties, the times of treason, of speaking formally, of a queen saying “you dare defy your queen!?”. It's all there, and the author uses it with something special, time magic. A modern concept, brought upona land that isn't ready for it. The limit of being a magician, and an actual warlock. We stand in a world where this brings upon the story we experience. The story develops like it should, characters have a motivation, but it's only 22 chapters. Only the main character, Oldman, manages to reach a satisfying point, but the rest are just people with an archetype. The crazy scientist, the ditsy and skilled girl, the war woman, the queen, the bully. It all becomes part of a destiny, or prophesy, that's forced on the audience without much development. It would've been so great if every character had at least room to get explored. Three, hell, two chapters of everybody doing their thing, their emotions being brought to light. We only get climactic moments, but no build-up to them through the workings of the story. Things happen, and eventually we get a happy, yet, forced ending. The tone and actions of the characters didn't make sense at the very end. If they had some panels, even an extra page to reflect. You can see small fixes, and that's why it feels like a debut. Not bad by any means, the art being a beautiful aspect of this manga. Strangely realistic at times, with some marvelous detail on the faces. The cover art blows me away, and it shows the author knows how to draw. I have no problems with the art, and could call it the best part about “Oldman”. 6/10. Very much not perfect, undercooked to hell, characters change abruptly, too short, with a world that could've been explored just a bit more. The magician aspects were left to rot, and we end with a beautifully drawn medieval story that feels like an okay film, but wasted potential as a Manhua.

This is a relatively short manhua that follows a group of misfits being hunted by an evil queen. This group includes a genius magician named Oldman, a war goddess with mechanical arms named Rebecca, the mad scientist that made said mechanical arms named Vincent, and a girl that can see the future but has memory issues named Neleh. Most of the story is quite simple in that it simply follows them as they’re running away from the queen’s forces, at times getting into fights in order to do so. This is pretty enjoyable due to the group dynamic being pretty amusing with each of themain characters having very strong personalities that come across very well. There’s also some great comedy. However, beyond that the story has very little substance. None of the characters have any depth. And though there are a couple romantic subplots, they’re very minimal. The overarching plot is ultimately centered around time travel. What it seems the author intended to be the big time travel related twist is incredibly predictable and thus the big reveal isn’t all that impressive. The rules for time travel aren’t all that consistent either, but not in the way that time travel usually ends up convoluted. Rather, the issues stem from when the time travel powers can be triggered and who they can apply to and to what extent. The reasons for why the time related power wasn’t just used constantly throughout the story just seems to be arbitrarily ignored for the climax to magically make things work out. I suppose since this is fantasy and not sci-fi that that’s fair enough, but in context I still can’t say I liked it. Thankfully, the ending does a pretty good job in how it leaves off the characters so the ending is still pretty satisfying. The art is pretty unique for Asian comics in that it has a pretty realistic art style but in medieval Europe like setting. The end result still has some of the flair that’s standard in manga/manhua/manhwa, especially in terms of the action, but overall I think it looks closer to western comics than eastern. That’s certainly not a bad thing though as the art looks great with many of the color pages being the highlight. Though some of the color pages also ended up looking off in an uncanny valley sort of way and being the low point artistically as well. tl;dr: A manhua that has fun characters and very interesting art, though the overarching story is weak.