Manta generously sent me a graphic novel of Disobey the Duke if You Dare (Volume 1) so I could review it for WWAC. This fantasy romance webcomic has been reformatted into a full-color printed book to be sold on Amazon directly to consumers. It’s also the publisher’s first print book! Exciting!
The book looks nice.
Disobey the Duke if You Dare Volume 1
Original story by Romance Machine K, produced by Chaerin Hwang, adapted by Chanmi Lee, lineart by aesp, coloring by Say and Juseon Lee, storyboard by Koo seul, background art by Woo, assistance by Dewdew, translated by Judy Hur, localization edited by Sydney Thompson and designed by Cindy Kim
Manta
April 18, 2023
My immediate reaction (after “Oh no, I’m so bored of straight people and vaguely pseudo-medieval fantasy settings, why couldn’t they have sent me a corporate BL instead”) was, “Ooh, shiny!” The title graphic on the front cover and lilies on the border circling the two leads have a holographic effect on them that makes them sparkle in the light. It’s a great touch that helps this book feel like a high quality art object. The French flaps on the softcover and satiny paper are also nice touches. If I was a fan of this comic already, I would want to buy this edition and store it in my home. Since I have never read this comic before, however, the high production values served to intrigue me and make me commit to giving this example of a genre I normally have negative interest in a fair shake. No one would put glitter and French flaps on a bad book, right?
The other thing I was really looking for was how they translated the vertical scroll format to print. This is where print editions of Webtoon-format comics often fail: they leave too much white space on a page, or the colors don’t convert to CMYK well, or the flow is weird because the panels were never intended to be read right-to-left but up-to-down. Disobey the Duke managed to avoid a lot of these common pitfalls, which is commendable. There were a few panels that could’ve been flipped for better flow, but they make good use of the print dimensions, even allowing for a double-page spread. There are a lot of splash pages, though, and I think because there are so many of them they begin to lose emotional impact after a while. All of the art looks sized correctly, not blurry or pixelated from being printed at a larger scale than originally intended. Web format to print conversion rating: pretty good!
The comic itself: absolutely unremarkable dark fantasy romance Webtoon material with a convoluted premise that serves more to confuse and annoy than intrigue. Lily has already buried two husbands, but before the second one is in the ground, her father arranges for her to marry yet another rich guy she doesn’t know: Vlad the Duke. Vlad won’t let her see his face… except he does, several times, and then lies to her and says he’s the commander of the armed forces, not the Duke. Because his face is so hideous the lady of the house won’t react at all to seeing it on a guy that’s not her husband, but would be horrified to see her husband with it. Very logical. When Lily knows she’s interacting with the Duke, for example, in their bedchambers, he makes her wear a blindfold, but when she runs into him out on the grounds, he tells her he’s someone else. Everyone else around them thinks this is stupid, but the Duke insists on it anyway until Lily melts his objections with her exceptional kindness and purity, or something.
The reason Vlad won’t show his face to her is because he believes he looks like a hideous monster… but when he looks in the mirror and the reader sees his reflection, he has a perfectly normal face with like, a sprinkling of scales on it because he’s a snake-demon-guy or something not yet fully elaborated on. He’s not even “Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast” level, he’s barely more animalistic than the Little Mermaid. To everyone else, he looks like a regular hot guy, but not even his “hideous” self-perception is particularly monstrous. Wings and horns are cool, not repulsive, haven’t you ever met a fourteen-year-old? The snake tail thing would seem more frightening and less like a fun add-on if he did not still have a hot-guy face and torso attached to it.
This reveal just makes his reasoning for keeping his face a secret from Lily seem even more flimsy, especially because no worldbuilding establishes that the wings-and-horns situation marks him as something culturally undesirable. His monstrousness is remarked upon by other characters, but it seems like it’s more of a metaphorical description of his military bloodthirstiness and not a literal description of his backstory. There’s one panel in the first episode that states he’s “an illegitimate child of an unholy monster,” but since it’s directly following the bloodthirsty warmonger thing it again seems like it might be metaphorical, and isn’t expanded on in detail in the rest of this volume. The volume ends with Lily’s male friend teasing that he knows why the Duke had hidden his face from Lily for so long. But honestly, I think the entire conceit lasted about ten episodes (which are still called episodes in this print edition instead of chapters for some reason) too long to work for me.
In looking up images to put in this article for reference, I learned that the Webtoon version has a prologue that explains a lot of the stuff I found confusing: Lily’s blamed for the deaths of her previous husbands, Vlad is some kind of snake hybrid thing. I don’t understand why this prologue wasn’t in the book version. Maybe they thought of it as more of a trailer than a prologue, and thus unnecessary?
Things I did like: Lily seems nice if bland, her maids are charming, the little priest guy is quirky. Vlad genuinely seems to care about Lily, and they do appear to be into each other despite the arranged marriage, and it being Lily’s third such marriage in a row (her first two husbands having died under mysterious circumstances). I love the butch (as butch as a Webtoon can allow, anyway, she’s still wearing eyeliner) lady knight side character, a rare and welcome addition to an otherwise predictable cast. Lily’s design is charming — the periwinkle hair is rare to see on a lead character, even in a fantasy Webtoon, but the rest of the designs and general aesthetic sensibilities are perfectly in line with the hundreds of other such fantasy romance Webtoons that exist out there. Nothing among the clothing choices or set design stands out in any way. This cookie has been cut a thousand times. I’m tired.
For their first foray into print production, Manta has done a commendable job with the physical edition of this book. Fans of duke-related romance novels looking to branch out into comics would probably enjoy giving this one a shot, though I don’t know how it compares to other fantasy romance Webtoons of the same subgenre. Disobey the Duke if You Dare was a complete miss for me, but it might be a good fit for someone else!
