Customer Reviews

The Tarot Cafe, Vol. 1

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Something that can annoy me a lot is a manga that takes a long time to actually get into the story because its hung up on a really long intro. Well, in Tarot Cafe, the alternative seems to be...no intro whatsoever. You jump right into the first story, without hearing a shred of backstory on the main character, Pamela. And surprisingly, it worked-because Pamela is only a medium stringing all the stories together, which are all slightly ethreal, and have a gently painful lesson in each.

If you read the blurb, the stories certainly sound unique. And they are, though I think they have a greater depth potential than what the author ended up using. Like I said before, Pamela shows up briefly in each tale, but ultimately everything that the characters do are based on their own personal tragedy. I liked all of them, because each is a different take on love, and though every romance isn't resolved the way the central character wished it would, you see that there is always room to be happy, as sad as getting there was. It's too heartbreaking to be a romance, but Tarot Cafe has love around every corner, and it chides you to not get carried away in a fantasy of "Happy ever after"

The artwork is by a remarkable artist, who also illustrated Les Bijoux. It is often praised for its beautiful pictures but critisized for a sub-par story. Park Sun Sang did not write the story for that manghwa, but I think she did for this one. I'm impressed, because the quality of plot and dialogue has multplied ten fold. I love Les Bijoux, but I have to admit that its textural contents were a league away from the level of the artist brilliance. Of course in Tarot cafe, the pictures don't look quite as nice as Les Bijoux- there's far less toning, and the people just aren't as "beautiful" anymore. But they're still impressive.

I absolutely love this manhwa series. The characters are original and every page is beautifully drawn and put together very well. Park has a unique style that most can't help but be drawn to.

The Tarot Café, owned by Pamela, gets quite a few strange visitors, and as Pamela reads their pasts, presents, and futures, their stories flow on the pages. Many of the stories were heart-wrenching, like the first one, that of the wish-fulfilling cat. Also, the story of the alchemist and the jester was a very good one that continues into volume two.

The Tarot Café is a fresh read, if you're looking for something new. Park Sang-Sun provides sumptuous artwork as well as great and straightforward stories to go along with them.

When I first picked up this book I took one look at the drawing style and layout of the pictures and put it back on the shelf. I eventually bought the first volume only because I loved Park's other series - Ark Angels

I then read it and was literally blown away. Park's illustrations are the most beautiful I have seen since the Angel Sanctuary series, a mixture of gothic and art nouveau. The detail that she puts in is amazing. Every picture is stylised and lovingly crafted.

The first volume is made up of short stories like Pet Shop of Horrors as described through tarot card readings. Each story is a lesson is love - full of anguish, emotion, sacrifice. For those who have read Loveless, you may love the first story about a cat demon. All characters are beautiful and sexy, but Park shows that beauty on the outside is not always reflected inside. Park pulls of the difficult task of introducing new characters in her short stories and making us care for them.

Each volume gets better and better as it goes on. The second volume concentrates on the story of a werewolf boy and starts to explain the mysterious background of the tarot card reader Pamela. Volume three concentrates on a sultan who has fallen in love with his servant and Pamela's own story. The fourth explains Pamela's connection with Belus. It also has the story of a step daughter confined to an attic by her wicked step mother and the tale of a musician who has promised his soul to a sprite. With so many gorgeous guys this is definitely a manwha for girls to read. However, how much you enjoy it will depend on how much you enjoy shonen-ai. If you love it like me then you too will be addicted to this series as Park creates imaginative and heart-wrending shonen-ai stories as well as many other types of love stories.

I loved this and hope you do to.

Tarot Cafe is one of the best mangas I have ever come across. Pamela is the young owner of the Tarot Cafe, set in downtown London, where customers come to have their cards read. But some customers aren't human.

San-Sun Park creates delicate figures and incredibly detailed art that will have you oohing and aahing. This is a Korean manga, and the little sound effects you see are the Korean script, not Japanese.

Volume One of Tarot Cafe contains three full stories and the beginning of a fourth, which is continued in Volume Two. In the first story, a special cat falls in love with a human. This story is along the lines of The Little Mermaid, and some would say it was a ripoff, but it will touch your heart nonetheless. The second story is a "tribute" (again, some will say ripoff) of Interview With a Vampire. Set in Paris, a vampire has fallen in love with a human, with tragic consequences that have carried on three hundred years into the present. Third, a sprite with an attitude seeks to lift a curse so she can return home to marry her fiancee.

The last story is about a Gepetto-like alchemist. Seeking to capture the heart of a beautiful princess, he has created a living doll to entertain her.

Don't delay in buying Tarot Cafe.

I ordered this book based on a recommendation from Tokyopop. The contents are all short stories based on Pamela's card readings for customers...she reads the cards, and then the story shows what happens to the customer afterwards and how it related to the card reading. So there's no real joy of getting to know a character. There's too little, too shallow, of Pamela herself and her male friend whose name I already forget. And all the characters - though beautifully-drawn - are very androgynous-looking, with thickly-done, dark shadowed eyes, lipstick, etc. The only way I could tell whether a character was a man or not was to (a) see if he was referred to as a "he" or (b) see if he was drawn shirtless at any point. It was too confusing and too shallow, so I won't be sticking with this series.

Sang-Sun Park, The Tarot Cafe, vol. I (Tokyopop, 2005)

Park kicks off a series of the most stylized manga I've ever seen with this book, four episodes that do little more than set up some characters and show us how they'll react to various situations. Still, it's fun, if it's your sort of thing.

The first thing you need to know about Tarot Cafe, if you're planning on reading it and know a little art history, is that you've never seen manga done this art deco (with more than a hint of Aubrey Beardsley lurking about) before. It wouldn't, aside from the production values and paper stock, look terribly out of place were it to turn up in a parlor in New York in the 1920s. Prepare yourself, as well, for a good deal of sexual confusion; there will be a number of times where you will go quite a few panels with a character before figuring out that character's sex. (Which normally wouldn't be a problem, but there are some times where it makes the plot a bit confusing.)

At the center of it all is Pamela, a fortune teller who runs the Tarot Cafe. Normally she simply does readings for us mundane folk, but after hours, she sees rather more interesting clients-- vampires, cats who can take human form, that sort of thing. This, of course, is where the meat of the story lies; in this volume, we are given four tales by clients, and not terribly much of Pamela at all, except the basic "yes, go on with your story" prompting. But we learn how she reacts, and the ways she treats various customers. We'll see more of her later.

Intriguing. ***

I picked up this Manhwa because the art was just too beautiful. I didn't even care about the story because I wanted to study Sang Sun Park's drawings to help improve my own drawing. I did enjoy the storyline and I have been scrambling to catch up all the copies up to volume 5. Volume 6 is supposed to release this month, woohoo! The story is about a mysterious and very loveable clairevoyant woman name Pamela who has opened a cafe where she reads Tarot for a host of unusual customers, from vampires to Sidhe (dark fairy folk) and tree spirits. At the same time, Pamela's interesting history is slowly unveiled. I can't tear my eyes away from all of the jaw-dropping beauties (male and female) that grace the pages.

Pamela runs a Café by day. After midnight, she does tarot readings for various supernatural individuals (a cat, a vampire, a ghost, a werewolf). The reading is the setup for a story of the client's life and problems. Most of her clients are evil whiners of the "I hurt my hand hitting someone" type. But we also have to interrupt their stories four or five times to have Pamela turn over the next tarot card and "predict" the next part of their story, which is if possible even more annoying.

Story after story recounts the monotonous themes of sadism, sexual abuse, and domination -- between master and slave, father and adopted son, brother and sister, creator and "living doll", kidnapper and prisoner, stalker and ex-best-chum. It gets seriously . . . boring! "I was too brutal," one pedophile/torturer/rapist/mass-murderer concedes gallantly. Pamela mildly agrees he should have had more perspective. "Love" as domination/ownership/abuse is totally okay so long as it is not "too brutal." The weak are punished for protesting or asserting themselves, but offered sympathy to the extent they are completely submissive (doll), self-abnegating (cat), or repentant of prior assertiveness (werewolf).

The blurb for this comic squeals that it has "a bishonen factor through the roof," but be warned that unless you like watching those "bishonen" strike unintentionally amusing drugged-out hooker poses, or slobbering over scared and skinny young boys, they won't do much for you. Like the "jester" in one tale, most characters resemble soulless dolls dancing to the tune of a bored sadist. The males are devoid of even the smallest spark of masculinity, and the females all seem to be on laudanum, particularly Pamela. I won't reveal what her Ultimate Goal is, but the revelation that her life is a meaningless burden to her comes as NO SURPRISE WHATSOEVER.

Some have compared this to Matsuri Akino's PET SHOP OF HORRORS, but TTC completely lacks PET SHOP's cleverness, horror, and power to unsettle on the one hand, and its well-observed characterization, snarky humor, and deeply felt (if ironic) humanism on the other. Not to mention its ability to keep you awake. One story that attempts a PET SHOP-style clever twist (vampire) succeeds only in being so stupid as to be funny (which was actually a really nice change, don't get me wrong).

If you like Gothic shoujo, you can do better. XXXHOLIC features a similar "shop" setup with a mysterious proprietress and her cursed boy sidekick. But the art is far superior, the proprietress is a strong, vibrant woman who knows how to crack a smile, and the focus is on the boy's growth and empowerment rather than on prurient sadism.

The editorial reviewer who recommends this to tween girls doubtless based this opinion on the first book only, which goes easier on romanticized abuse, has a cute-sprite story which is not exactly typical, and gives us the closest thing to a strong female character in the series. Volume 2 will give you a better idea of what the series has to offer, and is the first to introduce ongoing plot elements (but begins halfway through a story carried over from Book 1).

If ever I were to name off a more under-appreciated manga series, it would be The Tarot Cafe.

Each manga volume compiles several, separate stories of customers who come in to the cafe to have a tarot reading with the cafe's elusive owner, Pamela. Cleverly interwined within these highly enjoyable, smaller stories is the bigger story - the story of our heroine, Pamela, and the answers to questions such as why is she so elusive? Why does she give these tarot readings anyways? Why does she not accept money as payment and only small marble balls? What is she? In a way, it follows a formula set up by manga series such as Petshop of Horrors: little stories integrated and wound together to create a much bigger story than you or I could imagine.

The little stories within The Tarot Cafe can be absolutely heart-rendering and sometimes hold more impact than a pivotal moment in a linear shoujo series. The characterization is so elusively deep that after reading a volume of The Tarot Cafe, I feel like I've just arrived from a long, full journey. Also it's nice that the manga takes a backseat to damsel-like heroines, because Pamela is anything but.

The artwork on display definitely gives an added advantage. The artwork is so incredibly detailed down to the right-most eyelash. It still awe-strucks me everytime. I have only read perhaps one manga series that could rival such detail, but overall the artwork in this manga takes the cake. Every character is a model of beauty in his or her own way, the concept of which is amazing to see.

This manga series really has the full package - a story riddled with mysteries but plentiful with enjoyable stories that distract you from any frustrations you might feel with the mysteries, interesting characters which double as gorgeous eye-candy, and glamorously over-the-top artwork. I would reccomend this to ANYone who reads manga, regardless of what genre they prefer, because really, anyone who reads manga can appreciate this series.

This manga was truly an interesting read. The author, Sang-Sun Park, has a very unique art style, somewhat goth. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. And the story was very compelling, and unexpected at times. It's about Pamela, the owner of the Tarot Cafè. Not only does she run the cafè, but she also helps supernatural beings.

This was the first book I had read by Sang-Sun Park. (She also wrote Les Bijoux, and Ark Angels). I really liked it, and probably will buy volume 2, and maybe one of her other books.
I would definetly recommend this book to you! It is very much worth your money.