The Spring 2024 Manga Guide

The Uncanny Counter

What's It About? 

The word is that the noodle shop on the corner serves broth that's out of this world. But little do they know... it's run by people from the afterlife! To be more precise, the restaurant is a front for individuals called Counters who have formed contracts with souls from the hereafter. They were given special powers for their job, hunting down renegade souls who had escaped to Earth to prey on the living. When So Mun, a high schooler disabled by a tragic car accident, is invited into the group, he hesitates...until he's offered a chance to meet his deceased parents as a reward. Can he complete the mission and tell them the words he never got to say?

The Uncanny Counter is a webtoon by E Jang with an English translation by Tapas Entertainment, Inc. This volume is lettered and retouched by Toppy. Published by Ize Press (March 19, 2024).

Content Warning: Realistic bullying

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

If there's one thing to say about The Uncanny Counter right off the bat, it's that this is one of the webtoons that makes a smooth transition into print form. That's not the case with all of them – sometimes it's painfully obvious when a manhwa was meant to be read vertically. But this one works; Jang E's layouts are easy to follow and make full use of the page without a lot of wide vertical gutters. It also must be said that they've got a way with violence; that's generally not my favorite thing to read, but there's one scene of a bone being broken and shoved out of place and then later put back by someone's healing powers – you can see the shape of the bone under the skin and watch it move. It's genuinely impressive.

The story itself is interesting as well. When Mun So (whose name is a homophone for "rumor" in Korean) was about eleven, he was in a car accident that killed his parents and resulted in him being in a coma for a year. Now at eighteen, he's got a permanent limp and a hefty dose of survivor's guilt, both of which are implied to put him closer to the afterlife, called Yung in this story. (That's not the actual afterlife in Korean mythology.) It's a convenient link in a few ways, the major one being that it allows a dead woman to use his body as a host to make him a Counter, a human with the ability to help send evil souls back to an afterlife they've escaped. It makes for interesting mythology, and Jang E does a good job of showing the universality of it – Mun So's ghost is German, while the other Counters' are Chinese, American, and Kayan. (At least, based on her clothing, that's my guess.) Yung seems to function like Gabrielle Zevin's YA novel afterlife in Elsewhere, with every deceased person spending an allotted amount of time there. And just like there are good and bad people on Earth, there are good and bad people in Yung, which is essentially the root of the problem – bad people aren't known for following rules, after all.

This volume is mostly set up, but it's an interesting setup. It establishes the mythology, the way the Counters work, and how being a Counter is going to change Mun So's life. But it also gives him a reasonable background and some school friends who are important to him, and part of the plot is likely going to be him trying to balance out his new supernatural activities with his regular life. There's a definite content warning for bullying here, and I suspect that the school bullies Mun So and his friend Woongmin are dealing with will become much more central to the plot as things go on. I'm in this for a second volume, because I'm very curious about where this story is going.

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Lauren Orsini
Rating:

As far as I can tell, The Uncanny Counter is the first manhwa release in the Seasonal Manga Guide that has not had an anime tie-in. It may not have an anime connection, but it still has an impressive pedigree—it is popular on both Webtoon and Tapas. It even generated a two-season Korean live-action TV show that you can watch on Netflix. Now, its first print and digital volume is a satisfyingly long 11 chapters spanning nearly 250 pages, giving us plenty of time to absorb the complexities of a fictional South Korea plagued by evil spirits.

"Counter" is no less than a triple pun here. This is a supernatural battle story about people who work at a noodle counter by day and as "Counters" by night: people with special powers that allow them to 1) count souls and 2) counter the forces of evil. These Counters share two things in common: inhuman strength and abilities and a past instance when they each fell into a coma. According to the in-universe rules, comatose people are capable of communing with spirits in the afterlife, called Yung, in this story. Yung is just like life on Earth, except you can't die. Not immediately, at least: "Once you're here, you spend your designated amount of time and die," said one spirit denizen of Yung—so it's closer to a more pleasant form of limbo. However, some evil spirits have figured out how to capture people's souls to keep them from going to Yung at all. Those demons are whom the Counters attempt to keep at bay.

This is just a quick outline, but it barely scratches the surface of The Uncanny Counter universe. I'm still sketchy about how this overcomplicated system is supposed to work, like how Counters are more powerful in "territories" where the connection to Yung is stronger. At least the protagonist, Mun, takes everything in stride. After he becomes briefly possessed by the spirit of an old German woman, he joins the Counters—a motley group including Mun's new love interest and one spitfire old lady whom I particularly love.

Right before gaining these powers, Mun began dealing with one of manhwa's biggest clichés: a gang of cartoonishly evil school bullies. After a car accident left him with a limp, he's not able to fight back. That all changes after he becomes a Counter. He's able to give those bullies their delicious, if predictable, comeuppance and move on to tougher opponents: evil people possessed by evil spirits (another complexity: demons only possess Bad Guys). As Mun adjusts to his new life as a Counter, the story keeps throwing weird world-building details at us. For example, Counters only require an hour of sleep. I felt like I spent the whole story learning new rules!

Though I found the story a bit confusing, as a manhwa fan I'm less in the dark than a newbie to the format would be. For example, it might be instinctive to try to read this comic from right to left like a manga, but it is written from left to right. Additionally, it leans heavily on multiple themes that are common to its contemporaries. For example, the bullying subplot reminded me of two different Webtoons: Lookism and Designated Bully, which tell the stories of lawless schools where brawn determines the pecking order. Manhwa is filled with stories of outcasts getting supernaturally strong and getting revenge, which is to say that this overly intricate story is a small fish in a large pond.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.