Illustrator Racami from Korbach with comic for Manga Day

Korbach – Which life is best for me? The young woman Erin – like many in her age group – takes this question very seriously and tries to find a good answer. Problem: “I can do most things pretty well, but that’s exactly why I don’t know what I should do best.”

In the new manga series “The Curse of the Purple Smoke”, comic artist Racami from Korbach, whose real name is Caroline Tent, tells how she ends up in the household – not to say in the custody – of a sorcerer and has to serve him for ten years.

An excerpt from the first volume will be published for Manga Day, which begins today, Saturday, September 21st. Booksellers and comic shops in our region are also celebrating what is by far the most successful genre in the comic market. The Japanese cartoon adventures are particularly popular with young target groups, and the range of offerings for the genre is becoming increasingly diversified on the German market.

“The Curse of the Purple Smoke” is undoubtedly aimed at a female audience. Heroine Erin, with her strikingly delicate facial features, the medallion around her neck and her vibrant dark hair, which always seems to have a life of its own, is a sympathetic and identification figure from the very beginning. Washed up on a beach in front of high cliffs, she ends up stranded in shallow water, narrowly escaping an accident – Racami manages to charge the rising air bubbles, to which she has dedicated an entire picture against a gloomy background, with a slightly eerie atmosphere.

Erin woke up in a kind of winter garden, a homely place full of small shelves with mirrors, stacks of books and potted plants whose tendrils have also taken over the ceiling. Racami’s drawings here are delicate and poetic, atmospheric in clear, black and white contrasts. A sorcerer orders the young woman: “Don’t snoop around in my things.” Narrow chin, pendant around his neck, top with a hood wide open, a kind of hoodie magic cloak draped around his shapely neck. He is an androgynous, as it later turned out, mysterious personality with wrists adorned with chains. A light hatching is enough for Racami to show how ashamed Erin is, how slightly uncomfortable she is with the situation.

The third protagonist soon appears, a being called “Plant” – unable to speak, but full of affection and turning to Erin with heart-shaped finger gestures. She calls this sweet whirlwind “Ivy” and is happy that she is her companion in the still eerie world of this house, which may remind you of a Victorian villa in need of renovation. Many trails are laid out, Racami places further characters, secrets, relationship entanglements in her romance manga, which are far from resolved in the reading sample of the first volume. So one can only hope that the gender relationships and their simplistic nature will be softened by greater differentiation in the future, so that the constellation in the country house kitchen does not remain as terribly backward as it seems here.