I had hoped to find a manga that had some Halloween content to review for today, but, in a surprise to no one, most of what exists out there are doujinshi. I say this should not be a surprise because Halloween is a very Western holiday. Even though a lot of Eastern countries have been importing an opportunity for a adults to dress in costume, most countries have their own special day when the dead honored and/are closer to the land of the living. In Korea, there is Chuseok, for instance.
However, I did find this manhwa, Halloween is Nothing Special/Quite the Ordinary Halloween... I will warn you that this one is not licensed in English and, to make matters worse, the scanlations are very jumbled. Four out of five are available? At least, that’s all I could discover, not feeling up for a deep dive.
My final warning is this: it’s a sad story, not exactly the sort of thing I’d been looking for…
SPOILERS
.
.
.
.
Yoo Jinyong has a routine for every Halloween. It involves sleeping in until past noon, having a hearty breakfast that he doesn’t even taste, and… housecleaning followed by an early bedtime.
Yep, this man is deeply depressed.
We discover the reason for his depression is that several years ago, on Halloween, he both met and lost the love of his life, Kim Eunchan.
Yoo Jinyong is not much of a party boy, but he got talked into putting on a quickly purchased costume and hitting a gay dance bar with some friends. Turns out the friends were looking for a drunken excuse to make out with each other, leaving poor Yoo Jinyoung on his own. He slunk around the bar for awhile, and then ended up outside trying to find a taxi on a night when everyone is out partying. Cute Kim Eunchan sidles up to him and asks if he wants to hang out together, since he’s actually got a cosplay job he has to go to and, well, Yoo Jinyoung seemed lonely and… well…
(I don’t know if you should date a man in crocs, hun.)
They end up dating for years, always making Halloween their special anniversary night.
Things go swimmingly and Yoo JinYong is thinking this guy is ‘it,’ and, then, of course, its time for tragedy.
While hurrying to meet JinYong after work, Euchan crashes his motorcycle and dies. JinYong is devestated and starts living this empty, nonexistence that we see him doing now. His Halloween becoming a hollow, empty day of nothing special. It’s heartbreaking, but the author isn’t done pulling our heartstrings, no. Just as JinYong is thinking about what’s next on his list of boring things to accomplish, Euchan shows up. In the flesh. The gods have granted him a day off from Heaven and so he’s here to spend one last day with JinYong.
The scanlations are jumbled after this, but I found one site that had more than one chapter (which I linked to above). It seems that Euchan is able to convince JinYong to go out one last time and maybe try to have a nice time and sex and generally enjoy Halloween again.
This seems to start to happen, but then JinYong is almost runover by a car himself and he breaks.
What happens after that is a mystery….
I will say that the sex is an actual pan to the left and this whole thing is a gigantic bummer because it includes scenes that are especially heartbreaking to those of us Olds from the closeted days of yore, specifically a post-funeral scene where it’s clear that this JinYong is such a stranger to Euchan’s family that they are like, “Were you close?” LIKE, YES, I WOULD HAVE MARRIED HIM, but no one knows that and it’s clear that this is not the time to ‘come out’ to the parents, because a fight would just increase everyone’s pain. I haven’t, thank god, had to be in this exact space, but I know what it feels like to be labeled just “a good friend” when you’re so, so, SO much more than that.
Anyway, not really recommending this one. Not only are all parts of it hard to find, it’s neither sexy nor a fun, heartwarming take on this holiday. (Maybe if the ending existed somewhere in English?) The art is only okay, and, yeah, I just feel vaguely sad and unsatisfied now.
But, uh… hey, Happy Halloween (and Blessed Samhain!) to everyone who does celebrate it out there!
Source link
