Hidden at the Edge of the World: The Vagrant Soldier Ares

An action driven series in a printed graphical media of any sort rarely stays consistently good over the course of a long series, but Vagrant Soldier Ares by Ryu Keum Cheol (류금철) pretty much does exactly that.  Comics, manga, graphic novels, manwha (which I'll explain in the next paragraph) and printed media along those lines all are in the same unique situation when it comes to the portrayal of action; they can show still pictures and imply movement subtly, but can neither show movement like film can, nor can they leave everything up to the audience's imagination like a novel can.  Ideally, in still graphic style works the text and art work together in telling a story and portraying the scenes within and complement each other, rather than detracting attention one way or another.

Manga, manhua, and manwha are all east Asian words for comics in their own languages (Japanese, Chinese, and Korean respectively), which here in America is creatively borrowed for use when referring to comics which come from said countries because it's a hell of a lot quicker than saying ______ country's comics or sasparillalistictabulousnessosity.  Said fore-mentioned foreign worded drawing collections are generally stylistically similar to each other, especially in comparison to American comics, but, as with all things, author's perspective and culture of origin has an impact on how they present their work.  Manwha distinguishes itself from manga in two basic ways: Manwha is normally read from left to right (though sometimes the author decides to write backwards like the Japanese for some bloody reason...); and their is no major animation industry that constantly looks to it for material, so it's rarely adapted into anything else.

Getting back on topic, Ares itself is set in a Roman eraish style world with probably Greek gods and, well, this is a good place for this:

Ares resembles a shounen style action series (and may be classified as such depending who you talk to, but that's all semantics) but avoids a lot of the more annoying tropes that tend to get repeated over and over throughout said aforementioned series.  While the main character, Ares, is lazy, glutinous, and somewhat touched in the head (All three of these are TM the country of Japan), he departs from the usual stereotype shounen hero in the rest of his actual attitude; he's not on some ridiculous never ending quest that seems to inspire him to be in a constant state of annoying sugar high attitude, but is rather just trying to live his life via his (bullshit) swordsmanship skills and he is willing to fight and kill if the situation calls for it; this is in a way refreshing when compared to the normal shounen action protagonist outlook of killing is bad and I'm going to beat you to death to prove it.  Another thing this series, thankfully, lacks is any stupid names for moves (or any shouting out of said stupid names while doing said idiocy) or any power level creeping over the course of the entire series; Ares starts the series as a bad ass fighter and stays that way throughout the series.

Vagrant Soldier Ares is a great example of "Show don't Tell" in comic book style form, with dialogue kept to either whatever is necessary to narrate the story, with bits of comic relief and character building dialog thrown in for flavor.  The author/artist also does an excellent job of taking advantage of the medium's strength in portraying action scenes with informative angle changes and a solid pacing in the portrayal of the scene's progress from panel to panel.

Ares is not short at 26 volumes, but long as this series is, it begins with a good base to support it; Ares starts the series by joining a mercenary company and you follow him and his new found friends from battlefield to battlefield and campaign to campaign, with all the death and carnage that one expects from a war filled action series.  This is also a good contrast from the usual shounen never ending quest approach to said long series and makes for more episodic reading that doesn't try to force itself down your throat all at once, especially since the major arcs tend to have very clear breaks between them.  In truth, I found it took about as long to read three to four volumes of Ares as it did to read one volume of a similar series, mainly because of all of the above factors.

Ares is an excellent read to pick up from somewhere on the internets if you're the type that knows where to look (I'm afraid I can't help too much with it this time) as it is, unsurprisingly, unlicensed in any English speaking country, which is kind of a shame, but somewhat understandable all things considering (good does not, unfortunately, equal sales and companies have to make a profit in order to not go out of business).