Subject: Manga Review: Dramacon, vol. 1 | Author | Messages | Billy Aguiar
Posts: 84
 | Posted: 10/6/2006 5:32:10 PM | Dramacon, vol. 1
TokyoPop
$9.99, b/w, 192 pgs, Available Now!
Created by Svetlana Chmakova
Reviewed by Billy Aguiar
Three stars
Dramacon is another one of TokyoPop’s original global mangas, but unlike Earthlight, it is available now. Despite it being out for a while, I think it is still worthy of notice. It was nominated for a Harvey award, though unsurprisingly it did not win, and the second volume of it is due out soon so there will be undoubtedly be an increase of interest in the first volume.
Dramacon is about Christie, a manga/comic book writer who goes to her first anime convention with her boyfriend, the artist of their comic, and all of the drama, pun precisely intended, that one finds in cons and relationships and potential new loves is compressed into a two-day span. A lot of this background will be familiar to comic fans because Christie, as an aspiring writer, is not that far removed from the experiences of any comic fan at a comic book convention.
But it also shows some of the differences between comic and manga conventions, where fans are major sellers of goods, the sweet, sweet temptation of Pocky, and the need to lay in a store of it for the long cold season between conventions.
What I do want to talk about, which someone commented on last time, is that relationship titles can lack drama and action. Sure, something like Dramacon may not have the action of, say, X-Men, but it isn’t the action of the title that brings people back to it. It is the relationships between those characters, in an entertaining backdrop, that helps explains the attraction of these titles. If we want to talk about the Phoenix saga, the most adapted of the X-Men storylines, there have been a half dozen versions of it in comics, animation and the movies, but in all of them the core story of a tragedy involving Jean, Scott (Cyclops) and Logan (Wolverine) continues. Details may change, but core story of those relationships remain.
So while Dramacon is set in an anime convention, it is a setting not too unfamiliar to comic fans, being only slightly different from comics conventions. Action is limited to merely fisticuffs, but the story still delivers.
This is a weekly manga review here on the CBG site, but don’t forgot to check out my other review site, Prospero’s Manga for more manga reviews.
www.tokyopop.com
Vol. 1 ISBN: 1-59816-129-6
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