Introduction

Murphy's Law is a sparkly shoujo-esque tale involving love and relationships including all the mishaps both serious and funny that happen to befall our protagonist; Mary. It is a graphic novel length one-shot story contained in just over one hundred pages.

The motto of this story is “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong” and Faye Yong doesn't disappoint in this regard. With all the obstacles our heroine Mary has to overcome including: snobs, gold diggers, snotty doormen, untrustworthy boyfriends, her own misconceptions and a world without taxies will she ever find her prince?

Writing

Overall the story is fairly well written, it's strong enough to keep the reader wanting to know the outcome. At times this story can be humorous but at the same time it can be over the top and makes occasional use of cliché. There are however serious moments when the reader can genuinely feel for the characters involved.

Art & Design

This is by far this graphic novels strongest asset. The artwork on the whole is of excellent quality, the typical manga fan could say it's quite 'fruits baskety' in terms of style but only more mature looking with greater attention to anatomical details; in short quite pleasant. The use of tone appears to be well planned with nothing standing out as being unnecessarily plastered in it or too lacking.

The artist obviously put a great deal of work into it and you can tell by looking at it.

Now being able to draw good looking people is about as much use as a bald poodle unless you can organise the frames into a coherent story. Faye generally does this quite well, everything makes sense and flows nicely from page to page with none of those OMG what just happened moments. Even the flashbacks which have black pages are distinguishable from the main plot; something many artists seem to forget about; even pros at times.

Conclusion

Murphy's Law stands out as being graphically very good, the story is fairly solid and likely to entertain most people with it's mix of humour, romance and characters which can elicit genuine feeling. The production values are very much on the mark. Some may cringe at the over the top areas and the cliché but you can't please everyone.

Overall I think Murphy's Law is a shining example of how OEL manga in the UK should be, most importantly it's characters which drive stories and engage people, without this all you've got is a book full of pin-ups . This is why Murphy's Law is a winner in my book.