Crescent Moon

OhHaiDer :]


Afternoon, all
What?
It's going to snow again in Canada?
Bollocks D:
Anyway
Today I bring youuuu.
Crescent Moon


Crescent Moon


Story & Art: Haruko Iida
Publisher: Tokyopop
Rating: Teen (13+)
Synopsis: (Wikipedia) The plot deals with Mahiru Shiraishi, a young woman with the ability to grant others good fortune by touching them. She herself does not benefit from this good fortune, and occasionally laments that this is because she has given all of her luck away to others. Mahiru begins to have recurring dreams of a demon, and these dreams soon lead to her becoming entangled with the "Lunar Race" — a collection of creatures of folklore such as vampires, werewolves, kitsune, and tengu. These creatures' powers are related to the phase of the moon, strongest when the moon is full and weakest when it is new. Mahiru learns that she is the "Descendant of the Princess" and that the members of the Lunar Race she has encountered, known as the Moonlight Bandits, need her help to recover the "Teardrops of the Moon," the source of their power. In the process, she attempts to heal the rift that has developed between humans and the Lunar Race, and bring the two closer together.


Art Review: 3/5 


I didn't particularly become fond of Iida's art style. The proportion of the bodies are a bit off at times, the angles are awkward, but some of the detailing in the panels are somewhat nice. The eyes (as usual) are buggy. I'm not even being picky this time, Mitsuru's transformed state looks mildly creepy, and even the normal eyes are just weird looking to me. It appears Iida tried to make her style seem real and attempted to combine realistic eyes with a taste of manga-style eyes, but that evidently didn't turn out too well. The only character design I liked out of this whole series was Misoka, and his eyes were shut for majority of the series.


Story Review: Crescent Moon looked promising but turned mediocre. The plot is somewhat oddly paced, however at times the backstories provoke some deep thought. The fight scenes are confusing, and short. I didn't know who was attacking what or what was being said and in which order attacks were being fired, and when random people decided to crash the party. Being a minor detail, I tended to ignore the fight scenes but there isn't much compensation in this series. Mitsuru and Mahiru are stereotypical, 2-D, annoying characters; Mitsuru, the typical demon who hates everyone else, believes he is super strong, and wants to fight alone but ends up hurting himself and have his selfless friends help him out and he still acts like a little snotty brat about it.   Mahiru; Print and press copy of the original heroine: kind, gentle, cute, determined, wants to help everyone, falls in love with the stereotypical male hero and all that garbage. The main goal in general, "Collect all the Tears of the Moon", sounds like any other fantasy manga where one has to complete a certain item to save the world and they don't end up doing it anyway, or they do, but some other villainous idiot decides to present something else to destroy the world. In general, this manga seems to be like an aborted love child between Inu-Yasha and Sailor Moon, what with all the moon references. This manga was tolerable, but nowhere near good reading material.


6/10