Potato is yum

Whenever Asura releases a new webcomic my expectations are generally pretty low. At this point I pretty much expect a 6/10 webcomic from them. Something readable but nothing that I would keep up to day on every week. To my surprise, Asura recently added a pretty good webcomic to their collection.

The webcomic I’m talking about is Rebirth of the Divine Demon which is a story about some guy who was really powerful that ends up dying and then enters someone’s body and decides to live in that body. The story follows many common tropes and doesn’t really innovate on anything however by following the common tropes the story avoids many potholes on the path that many other Murim stories trip on. It also helps that the art that was done for this webcomic is incredible. I am tempted to even say it is on the same level as Nano Machine which is an incredibly high bar to meet. There’s no spoilers in this so you may continue without worry. 🙂

The story doesn’t let itself get bogged down in backstory by only including brief flashbacks to history that span at most 1-2 panels with longer backstory embeded inside of scenes where the main character is also trying to figure out the world alongside the reader. This makes the backstory introduction feel very natural and maintains interest by keeping it short and to the point. I often see murim stories go through and explain the backstory of a villain that the main character take 2 frames to walk up, slap, and kill them. Why spent five panels developing a character that doesn’t actually matter? It’s honestly a waste of time. 5 frames isn’t enough time for me to form any real connection to a character and simply knowing a character’s backstory won’t make me feel any reasonable amount of empathy for them. As a reader, I develop my connection with characters through that character’s interaction with other characters. I very much appreciated the author’s respect for my time as a reader by cutting out much of the unnecessary filler by either not asking about it or making the main character cut off what could have been a monologue.

I also really appreciated the semi-predictable payoff cycles in the story. From the nature of it being a murim story, we already know the main character will be able to get to the end of each arc and win. It’s kind of obvious that the main character will need to power up and as a reader I always have some idea in my mind for how I think the main character will power up. However, the author always manages to make some kind of plausible twist that made my prediction only partially correct. This would give me validation because I was right but not bore me because there was something more to what the story had to offer.

The characters felt very real. This was complimented by extremely detailed art that helped to solidify the disposition of each character making many of these characters feel like they were actual people and not puppets dancing in a plastic stage.

Overall, I would give this webcomic an 8/10 as it is excellent but doesn’t bring anything new.