Last week browsing the library I stumbled upon a three volume manhwa (Korean comic) called "Ark Angels" by Sang-sun Park. The author was new to me, but the cover was cute enough. I figured, eh why not.
The main character is Japhet, who was always my favorite in the ark story. In this case Japheth is a girl joined by her sisters Shem and Hamu. They are the daughters of Noah. Instead of building an ark as ordered by God, Noah and his girls (well really just his girls) are part of a collective of semi-divine creatures. The council must decide the fact of humans on Eath. The two sides want to save an anthropomorphized Earth from human pollution. While that idea is used often (i.e Bruce Coville's My Teacher is an Alien series and Clamp's X/1999), our heroines, following the biblical story, must save the Earth one endangered species at a time taking them into an extra-dimensional ark. While the overall premise is not terribly original, the creator keeps the story interesting.
While this story is a bit elementary, it is cute with "scary parts" and "dating." The plot is a collection of stories related to the animals (which to them look like humans). Each animal has their own history and story that are believable and very human. The girls are childish, but fun. Japheth has the same energy as Hikaru of Clamps' Magic Knight Rayearth. Japheth is the real focus as she looks with untainted optimism that humans can be better. It can be a bit preachy about conservation, but no worse than Captain Planet (is our hero, is going to take pollution down to zero).
These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. (G. K. Chesterton)
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. (Albert Einstein)
A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales. (Marie Curie)
If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. (G. K. Chesterton)
The experience of wonder continually reminds us that our grasp of the world is incomplete. (Stephen Greenblatt)
It was because of wonder that men both now and originally began to philosophize. (Aristotle)
Benediction
This is not a gray world.
May your days be alive with the electrifying colors of God's presence and wonder.
May you look up and around you even in the midst of your burdens.
May you look for God's love in the faces around you, in the falling of rain, in the sound of footsteps in snow.
May you take in the colors of the life God gives you until your eyes and spirit ache with them.
May you be as a bride seeing in every hour the face of her Beloved.
May your wonder make the colors visible to those who walk with their heads down.
May your surprised joy and your devotion make the voice of God audible to those who walk with their pain loud in their ears.
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