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Armageddon is the story of a fairly nerdy weakling high-school kid named He-Sung Oh. He keeps having these dreams about being a freedom fighter in a futuristic war, and in these dreams is a mysterious blonde girl. To He-Sung’s surprise the girl from his dreams ends up as a new student in his high school. He-Sung deals with his normal high school problems as his childhood friend Um-Ji Choi competes with the new girl Mari Jang in athletics and admiration from the males in the school.
Throughout the telling of this story are various flashbacks to an epic space battle that happened long ago in the past. This is filled with tons of small details that are really hard to follow. These flashbacks also seem to be stealing directly from Star Wars in the way that the ships look and in the “long time ago” idea. These confusing flashbacks are supplemented with apparent flash forwards of a war on earth that He-Sung keeps seeing in his dreams. This storyline is equally confusing and helps little to move the plot along. It essentially is a confusing mess of mixed storylines with little explanation of what is going on.
This isn’t really a story that provides answers to what is going on. Instead it just leaves the reader with questions. Like, why is this dorky kid He-Sung so important? Or, what is the deal with the blonde-chick? And also, when do these dream sequences take place anyway, is it the far future or the near present? Trust me this book gives little insight to the answers of these questions, but I guess it was written with the intent of keeping readers hooked on the series waiting to find out these answers.
The art of this book is a little rougher than I have commonly seen from Lee. It is probably a reflection of it being an earlier work by the artist. The basic features are still there though. All his female characters look pretty much the same; big cheeks and porcelain doll expressions. The space battles are interesting, as black is used for the backgrounds and the ships are illustrated in white. There is a lot of variety in the different types of images portrayed. Spaceships are the focus of the past, war machines are emphasized in the future, and people (particularly high schoolers) are mainly shown in the scenes in the present.
I still have no idea what this book is all about. The switching of time periods and disruptions of storylines made it very hard to follow. And to make things worse, this volume ends with a completely unexpected cliff-hanger ending. Hopefully the second book will clear some things up; otherwise I can’t really recommend this series. It’s just a little too far out there.
-brant-
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