July's manga / #Magic(21)

It's a pretty light-hearted isekai, the OL female lead is transported to another world, and to earn a living, she must cook lunchboxes. She meets some important figures in the palace and learns that she is capable of magic. Everyone is now trying to figure out who summoned her in the first place. I'm sure the romance will be between her and the wizard, but it's progressing slowly so far, and I like it. The female lead is a little ditzy and super cheerful, but she's not annoying to me, like some other similar female leads are.

Wow, this webtoon is really good. It uses the previously popular concept of body-swapping very well, and effectively writes two compelling heroines into its narrative. I think I prefer this over the villainess isekai genre, since it's just done so much better this way. The two heroines are perfect foils for each other, Medea is strong and clever, while Psyche is compassionate and gentle, although the latter sometimes gets on my nerves. They grow as they become more comfortable in their new roles, discovering so much about each other, and learning of tragedies and misfortunes that the other has suffered. The art is absolutely beautiful, the author did a great job, especially with the details of the eyes. Of course, I prefer the look of Medea over Psyche, but I'm always rooting for Medea, no matter which body she's in. She's the badass heroine that goes around taking names and kicking everyone's ass. I hope the two of them can work together to take down the evil crown prince.

Art is alright, not spectacular, but passable. The story involves a sick immortal sun warrior witch who cannot be cured by anyone except someone from a tribe that she had helped wipe out. Both of the leads are bland and uninteresting, with no personality nor motivations. It's just very plain so far, but it may get better.

Oh my god, this manga is really not good. In terms of both the art and the story. The art is horrendous, all the people look like some poorly drawn cartoon characters, and they're neither cute nor beautiful to look at. The plot is some weird crossover of Harry Potter x Boku no Hero Academia, where the protagonist is OP but he needs to act like he sucks at magic to pose as an ordinary student at the magic academy. It's not even done in a fun or interesting way, since all the characters are super ugly and stupid and common tropes of things you expect to see in a typical shounen manga. And wow, it turns out that the only teacher in the school introduced so far is an arbitrary bad guy, who's shown to be super strong, but then gets trounced in 1 second flat by the male lead because he's so OP.

Nothing about this webtoon makes any sense, largely due to the horrible translation. I really don't know what is happening at all. There's a lot of cute chibi animals and magic flying around, but no real plot. The kingdom where the female lead lives is enemies with another kingdom where one of the male love interests lives, and they're scheming stuff about using magic and taking over the other kingdom. The art is pretty bad, everything looks like a cartoon, and most of the characters are drawn in a simplistic way that is not nice to look at.

Isekai x wine making x magic/cultivation type webtoon. Fairly standard so far, but there's only two chapters, so not much to judge by. Art is ok, but not the best. I'm not that impressed by this.

A boy with the useless job class of Appraisal is abandoned by his party members, and he nearly died, but is saved by a tree spirit and her guardian. He lost his eye, so they replaced it with an even more powerful version of his appraisal eyes, and he's learning to fight using his new ability. It seems ok so far, but nothing special. The tree spirit is completely in love with the male lead already, which is lame. The art is a bit too rough for my taste, but it's serviceable for shounen manga.

Ahhhh this isekai manga about cooking is hilarious, I really enjoyed all the chapters that are out so far. She was summoned to another world, but it turns out she isn't the saint, and instead was mocked for her chubbiness. She quickly learns to use her cooking skills to win over everyone in this new world, because the food they eat sucks. The personalities of the three royal brothers are distinct and complement each other. Art is good for shoujo manga, although not the most detailed.

Wow, this webtoon is a classic example of wasting space. Literally, there is more white space between the panels than the amount of panels per chapter. If you add up the total area of white space, it would be probably 2-3x more than the area of the panels combined. It makes it really annoying to look at, with so much emptiness separating each panel. The panels are tiny as hell, and even the art is somewhat mediocre, it just smushes everything in cramped, small windows that don't fully bring the story to life. I'm not even sure why this webtoon was drawn in webtoon format, because it doesn't take advantage of the flowing nature of webtoons, where the movement is from top to bottom. This could have easily been drawn as a comic style with direction of reading going from left to right. The coloring and lines are super bold and dark, like Western style coloring, which I'm not a fan of at all. The girl in the cover image gets killed off in the third chapter, how misleading to put her on a cover like a feature character. The lore of this world is terribly explained, even though it spends a good chunk of the first chapter trying to explain it. Why is this magic tower is important and cool, and how come the royal family can't go in, but librarians like the plain male character can work there and read the books? Why is the library there like a regular library, with normal fiction on the shelves, instead of precious magical texts and ancient tomes? Magic Tower is the most lazy name I've seen so far. Also, I think the author shot themselves on the foot because they can't even get their characters straight. When the princess is introducing herself, she says she's the fourth daughter, but when the guards say she died, they called her the second princess. When I read that, I rubbed my eyes and scrolled all the way back up to make sure that they were talking about the same character. How can the fourth daughter be the second princess? She should be the fourth princess, if my math is correct. Well, it seems like this story might go for a Groundhog Day type plot, where if the main character fails his mission, he needs to redo the day over and over. If so, I'd be interested in reading how this goes. But so far, it's a meh webtoon. Update: The size of the panels get better with newer chapters, thankfully. It's no longer a Groundhog Day plot, which is a bit disappointing, since I'd love to see it in a webtoon or a manga, other than Re:Zero. I'm adding a star since this seems to be improving as it goes along, but I'll still have to wait and see if the plot will become more original from here. Update #2: Well, thank you for proving me wrong, author. It doesn't happen a lot, but I'm finding this more and more enjoyable with each new chapter. Kudos to you, here's another star from me. Give me more Groundhog Day shenanigans, and I'm a happy reader. Update #3: Finished. Seems like this was cancelled, as the ending was extremely rushed and didn't address any of the major plot lines.

There's way too much going on in the first chapter alone. Even without googling, I can tell this was a light novel, because the pacing is so off. It may have been good in written form, but it doesn't work in this manga, due to bad execution. The female lead fought a war, met her first love, and got married all in one chapter. Then the second chapter, everyone dies. In the third chapter, she's reborn in another world, and she's going to school, and she meets her loved one again. Like what the hell? Give some space for readers to breathe! Also, even though she is Queen in her past life, she said she hasn't eaten good hot food in ages, what? Did she starve as royalty? I'm so confused, because obviously her previous father, the King, loved her very much and spoiled her. Yeah, nothing makes sense. The art is good though.