The Review Daemon: Tribe X
Today I’m reviewing Tribe X, an urban fantasy webtoon available to read on the Spottoon comic reading platform. Tribe X is written by Jae Kwon Hyun and Yoon Sun Park, illustrated by Ki Woo Hong and translated by Sumi and Riley Jung. I’m not sure if my critique and review will get translated by someone back into Korean, so my focus in this review will actually be less on critical advice for them as much as my thoughts on the comic for potential readers.
Synopsis:
Tribe X is an action urban fantasy centered around two Korean men with the supernatural powers of telekinesis: Tae-Min and Woo-Jin. Both have past connections (that have yet to be fully elucidated) with a crime boss. Tae-Min still works for him as a contract assassin, using his powers to kill his targets without ever touching them or getting close enough to leave clues. Woo-Jin somehow managed to escape the crime den and now works as a “magician” performing at a magic cafe. From the prologue and the events of the first season it’s obvious that a confrontation between the two as looming as their two very different lives take an intersecting course. All while police are investigating Tae-Min’s murders, but beginning to suspect Woo-Jin may have been involved.
Plot:
The prologue of the comic starts off with a very action packed scene, showing us what the superpowered protagonists are capable of.
Unfortunately it is unclear whether or not the prologue happens BEFORE or AFTER the events that follow. From context, after reading the majority of the season, I recognize that it must be a snippet of an upcoming scene, but at the time, I was very confused. Some sort of “Two Months Earlier” text or something when we transition out of the prologue would have gone a long way to clarify that.
Post prologue, we start to follow Woo-Jin and Tae-Min as they go about their lives and jobs. The authors keep a good pace up, alternating between action packed assassin scenes and character building and plot development to keep it from getting boring. The use of detectives investigating Tae-Min’s crimes is used well to further the exposition of the plot. It’s obvious that the story has been well thought out in advance, and each issue keeps building up to the confrontation we saw in the prologue. I like that technique, but my confusion at the beginning about when he prologue took place negated a lot of the benefit. In fact, as is, I would almost recommend that readers skip the prologue and start at the third issue, to avoid the confusion. The plot and suspense are built up well enough throughout that the confusion of the prologue outweighs its foreshadowing benefit, in my mind.
4/5
Characters:
Tribe X does a decent job developing the various characters thru their dialogue, actions, and flashbacks to their pasts. It happens gradually and organically for the most part, allowing the reader to discover more about the characters as they go. Some character portrayals were a little overplayed and poorly handled, in my opinion, relying on character tropes. I didn’t need a crime boss to literally drug and prepare to rape two women to know he was bad. Nor do I need the majority of the women to be portrayed as eye candy/fanservice, especially at the same time as you’re telling me the crime boss is bad (and worthy of his imminent assassination) for planning to have sex with them.
Fortunately this is a problem mostly in regards to minor and secondary characters, many of which either never get a name or are only named afterward or in passing. The main characters get much better treatment and time to develop. We see much more of this with Woo-Jin than with Tae-Min, who mostly just assassinates people and then parties excessively (involving many unnamed fanservice women) with his paychecks. I get the feeling that we’ll learn more about what made the two the way they are as time goes on, as we’ve gotten some hints via flashback (albeit mostly for Woo-Jin).
3/5
Dialogue:
I have to commend the translators for the team here. Reading through Tribe X I rarely (if ever) had any problems with the dialogue feeling stale or not fluent. I know that is a real challenge to accomplish, and they did a very good job at it. The worst I saw was a couple of mispellings, or accenting words strangely. Things like “mullah” instead of “moola”, or “clutz” instead of “klutz.” Or writing “Dannng” to emphasize the word being held and stressed instead of a more common “Daaaaang.” Just little things that didn’t distract me too much.
The dialogue itself is good. Nothing extraordinary that really caught my attention, but nothing bad either. The characters speak naturally, and an appropriate amount of dialogue happens per panel.
4/5
Lettering:
For the most part the lettering is also fine. I know that switching from Korean to English is going to cause problems, and some of that is evident in the spacing of the words within balloons, but they did a good job with it.
My biggest complaint with the lettering is with the sound effects. Many of them are fairly ridiculous sounding. When someone smirks, I don’t need a “smirk” sound effect, I can see it. I don’t need sound effects that describe the motion I’m seeing on the panel (“tremble”, “spin”, etc.). I just need sound effects that are showing me what SOUNDS are being produced.
The actual lettering in dialogue balloons is all fine though.
3.5/5
Art:
The art in Tribe X, both lineart and coloring, is professionally done in a manga/anime style. Lines are clean, shading is good, backgrounds are detailed, colors are more than just flats or simple gradients, etc.
I am not an artist, so I don’t have a ton more to say, or super specific details to provide. The art is clean and tells the story without distractions, besides from the fact that all but two/three of the women in the comic are drawn like this:
I don’t know if this is indicative of how the creators view women or just what they’re trying to say about the character of Tae-Min, and I get that of course they’re at a club so they’ll be dressed accordingly, but this is just how 90% of the women we see in this webtoon are drawn, and often in fanservice-y poses. I am not a fan of this service.
3.5/5
Panelling and Visual Storytelling:
Something different about webtoons compared to other webcomics that I’m not used to yet (or a major fan of) is the vertical scrolling layout. For me, it makes it harder to read the comic, especially when often the panels are taller than my screen, meaning I have to scroll up and down to try to look at the panel, or back and forth between panels. That isn’t something BAD, it’s just a reading layout I’m not that fond of. Probably because I read all my comics on my computer and not on a mobile device.
Something I did find bad though was that fairly often there would be a panel that was oriented 90 degrees to the vertical format, meaning that if I wanted to look at it I’d have to rotate my head. Maybe this was designed to be read on mobile or tablet, where you can just rotate the device, but again, I’m on desktop.
I don’t see what benefit there is to making the panel sideways. In fact, let’s rotate and see.
Ahh…much better. No eye or neck strain. I get that for a mobile device, orienting it like this allows you to have a wider framed panel, but as a desktop reader where screen size is not an issue, it is really annoying. I have to believe that there is a balance the creators of Tribe X can find that is still good for mobile readers without being difficult for desktop readers. If nothing else, uploading a different version of the episodes for different reading platforms may be worth the effort on their part.
Each panel is well constructed, but the shifting orientation and vertical distance between panels interrupts the reading flow for me, impeding the storytelling. This may be better on mobile, but I can only review what I’ve experienced.
3/5
Summary:
I enjoyed large parts of Tribe X. I wanted to read through to the end of the episodes available to me, I was interested in seeing where the characters developed and what happened in the plot. Most of my critiques and difficulties lay within how that was presented visually. An over reliance on visual tropes to define characters, the heavy use of cleavage and panty shot fanservice on the majority of the women, the difficulties with mobile-optimized layouts when I’m not on mobile. All of these decreased my enjoyment for an otherwise good comic. I’d recommend that you try to read Tribe X on a mobil device, maybe even thru Spottoon’s apps. If you do read it on a desktop, my reading experience was actually improved by zooming out to about 50%.
Reading experiences aside, I did enjoy the story, which in the end, is what it’s all about.