Disliked main character. ( )

Joel is a teacher in a Korean school and suffers from home sickness and lack of empathy with the alien culture surrounding him. Then he falls in love with Hannah - will this help him integrate Korean culture?
This comic book, despite its shortness, is simple and delicate in its narrative, the drawings are clear and graphically good and the storyline will hook you from the start, especially if you are hopelessly romantic. Dramatic, yet funny, this book will make you want to read more. For people who find this book too short, you can now find the collected work in two bigger books published by Oni Press. ( )

With such a short volume it's hard to judge the quality of this series or where it's going to go. The story is about Joel, fed up with Korea and his teaching job, every day edging closer and closer to calling it quits and catching the next flight home, till he meets a woman who in later volumes he's apparently attracted to enough to hang around for, though we barely get to that here. This volume follows a couple days with him, in which he wakes up, finds barley any food in his apartment, fights a cockroach, and then goes to work where he wines to his coworkers about how he hates it here and wants to go home. The cockroach vignettes do get rather tiresome, but actually this isn't as bad as it sounds. While I didn't find it outright funny, the tone is humorous and the conversations were semi-entertaining enough to keep my attention. Unfortunately, there really isn't that much more than that so far. There's no plot or romance as of yet, it doesn't take much advantage of the setting (all we really see of Korea is some uninspiring pictures of people on the streets, and mostly the only foray into the culture we get is a few comments/experiences with food. Perhaps the author was trying to reflect the main character's unromantic view of the place, but I would think the setting was one of the selling points of this story and would be used a little more), and again, it's not really all that clever or funny (though it doesn't have lame jokes that fall flat or anything, either. So points there, I guess?) I like the character design and the paneling is ok, but the backgrounds are pretty unimaginative. (I speak from a usually-manga-reader's perspective, mind.)

To sum up, the story seems decent at the moment, but barely begun. It needs a little something more to be worth continuing, though. It may get there later, and if this were a subject I was particularly interested in I might try another volume out. It isn't though, I just tossed this in my cart when getting some other things with the consideration it might turn out interesting. As it hasn't put out yet, I think I'll pass on future volumes. If you're buying at full price, the $5.95 is rather steep for so few pages as well. ( )

Joel is a Canadian teaching English in Korea and he is Burned Out. He's homesick and tired of living in a country where he's on the outside most of the time. He's made up his mind to quit his job and go back home when he meets the beautiful new secretary at the school and falls instantly in love.

I enjoyed the book, but I don't think my library has the rest of the series, so I'll have to see if I can get my hands on it... ( )