Dream Walker: The Dreamscape

I bought Dream Walker: The Dreamscape during Cosfest VIII. Well, it’s actually available in major bookstores (yes! Popular has it!) and online but I bought it at Cosfest especially because I wanted my copy autographed at the Comix Pandora booth along with the free postcard for that day too!

So how’s the story?

KYAAAAAAAA~~~ It’s nice! Let me do a breakdown overview of the whole thing of it first.

Artwork: Gorgeous, not crappy. It’s pretty constant in which the characters are drawn properly without any weird “errors”, I tend to see that sometimes in new mangas or doujins but there’s none of that here. It’s pretty dynamic too and the expressions are very good.

Genre: Shoujo. It looks and reads like a shoujo manga in which it’s targeted for girls. It’s adventure-y though so don’t be dissuaded into buying it if you’re a guy. You’d enjoy it still if you like Card Captor Sakura sort of adventures. Only you know, you don’t actually capture anything in this story.

Story: HAHAHAH. I likes it. It’s a girl who has powers, needs to be trained and stuff happens story. There’s a lot of these kind of books but it’s how you do it as always. I like this take on it when there’s a few local context that we’d get especially and oddly… I can actually see this as an anime during Saturday mornings.

Lol factor: A LOT. I’m amused especially with some of the training/attacking bits where the heroine has to do it. The dialogue is pretty good (I’m reading the English version by the way) and the storyline takes on a pretty funny twist at some points.

Price: Reasonable. $8.03 (Don’t ask me how you’re paying for 3 cents but it’s there on it.) Do you know how many pages this is? 148 without the extra bits at the end! It’s pretty thick!

Quality: They got the slightly yellowish paper that’s good for reading mangas instead of the bleached white. It doesn’t strain the eyes and the quality of printing is good. The cover is a glossy card stock and the colours on it is pretty vibrant.

DUH DUH DUHness: Grrr. No actual idea when book 2 is coming out except that it says “soon”. The story ends at a good point that comes to a close yet gives a leeway for the audience to go “GAAAAAH?” to wait for the second one.

It even comes highly recommended by the Comics Society of Singapore. That actually amused me a lot since I didn’t notice the “highly recommended” bit only after I bought it.

And furthermore, how DO they rate highly recommended or are there actually comics with “not recommended” on it?! In any case, I recommend Dream Walker on the above factors.

Okay, actually I took a picture of the author, Yeo Hui Xuan, during Cosfest but it had stupid lighting so the picture was blurry. No matter, she’s as cute and sweet as the above illustration. The manga’s by her and directed by Wee Tian Beng (of The Celestial Zone fame).

The blurb of the story goes like this:

Bizarre incidents have sirred this city and victims die in their sleep. Like any other regular student, Yume led an ordinary life. However recently, she has been plagued by the same nightmares everyday. After her encounter with Muca, Yume’s hidden dreamscape power is activated in the face of danger…

Nifty, huh?

The manga is available in both Chinese and English and amusingly, okay there’s only one typo I fixed in the blurb on the back of it which leads me to believe that the original script might be the Chinese one (I didn’t find any errors or maybe I was enjoying it too much in the main story though).

Anyway, I’ll be on a look out for book 2 whenever it comes out! And hey, maybe I’d email them to ask for a web interview about the book!

And now for spoilers because I need to squee here since I don’t see the forums talking about this new manga yet. ((HIGHLIGHT TO ONLY READ SPOILERS BELOW.)

AHHHHHHHHHH, Muca the cat turns into this hot guy in the dream world but I don’t know, Ken is pretty cool too! I wonder if she’d end up with any one of them in a romancy way but that’s just me talking.

Muca IS cute anyway since he’s a kitty. And Yume is sooo funny, she’s like a clueless thing at times especially when she tries to attack a black demon for the first time and smacks its eye! Gaah, have to wait for book 2 now, oh well! It reminds me of Skip Beat in a way!

End Spoilers.