The Tarot Cafe is a manga series about a tarot reader who does readings for an interesting clientele. She reads for vampires and magicians and fairies. It's a really light kind of fluffy series. A fun read.

I read a lot of comics, manga to be precise. So I was looking forward to read and review Tarot Cafe. As always, I did not read the synopsis or description given as to not be spoiled in any way.

I liked the characters’ design and it was a fresh look different than the mangas I am used to. The plot was intriguing however it was not something that I would read. It had too many stuff going on and being a person that knows nothing of tarot cards, I was constantly confused. I had to reread numerous times.

I'm in love with this series, no matter how much passes. I love Pamela and her gang.These characters combine the best of mythology, fairy tale retellings and gothic charm in one single,gorgeous volume. Everyone should read this! Will definitely read the next books if given the chance!

A manga about a Tarot Cafe? Yes sign me up!

Very small font around the Tarot cards describing what they are and how they’re relevant to the story on the computer screen? OH NO TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME.

Its annoying having to write a review that ends up being impacted negatively because of the format of the review copies but alas I shall do my best.

I did also find the story hard to follow at times, to the point where I panicked and thought I had read it back to front…

But other than those two things I actually really enjoyed this manga.

The character designs really blew me away and it was nice to see such attention with no use of colour.

The story follows Pamela as she reads tarot for supernatural beings, they all bringher a bead and a story. So as well as the overarching story of what Pamela is setting out to achieve with these bead we also get a bunch of short stories from each of the customers.

I really enjoyed the short stories as they all had something interesting to tell – from creating puppets to falling in love – many even had a folklore vibe to them too. I’d love to know the inspiration to a few of these.

The story featuring a cat was my favourite even if it was heartbreaking!

So was I fan? Yes, mostly. Will I read vol 2? Sure, but not from NetGalley. If anything I’d rather find a physical copy of this and give it a second read through before deciding whether I really do want to continue.

Not bad. . Good enough plot. I'm intrigued how the next volume turns out. Especially when Pamela's past comes haunting her. I loved the manga. Nice artwork. However the quality was not that good because when I opened it on Adobe Digital Edition reader I couldn't read well. And as I zoomed in the page became blurry.
But the story is good. So ya I gave it 4 stars.

2 Stars

I'll be honest its been a little while since my hardcore manga reading phase so maybe I'm totally out of the loop with what's popular and what's considered acclaimed. I just wasn't super into this; to start with one of the major reasons I picked this up was the tarot and the tarot reader being the main focal point of the stories. This felt more like a short story collection about a wide variety of people and their life stories with the only common thread being they had all visited this cafe and had their cards read. As a consequence of this, this came off feeling very unfocused and meandering while I was reading it.

I really enjoyed the full page tarot card spreads with included a short description about its significance and generally accepted meaning but for the rest of the volume I have to say the art was a little bit of a letdown. It wasn't as clean as I prefer or in a style that I would normally go for; the front cover is not indicative of the inside at all. I also, did really struggle with getting a download of this where the smaller texts were legible. It got to the point where I had to contact to the publisher to get the issue fixed, I will say they handle it admirably, it just made what would've been a small issue into a much larger disappointment.

So while this wasn't the manga to respark my love of the format I can definitely see this appealing to others and bringing a little bit of joy to their lives; I just won't be continuing it.

The concept is really interesting and I enjoyed the back and forth storytelling from the smaller stories to the overall arc. The story was interesting from what I could read but the formatting was hard to read on my computer in some places without zooming in really close.

Beautiful illustrations. Could not get into the characters or plot. Maybe would work with some YA audiences.

I didn't love this as much as I wanted to. The plot is interesting but there are so many characters that come and go that I had a tough time determining who was who. One issue with manga is that the characters are often androgynous. This was the worst I had seen - not only were they androgynous but they seemed to be all sexual orientations. Again not a huge problem except I couldn't figure out who was who.
With that said, I actually think I am going to track down a copy for myself. There were a lot of things I did love about this story. It's inspiring to me (makes me want to create art) and I like that. I love the little tarot card definitions and the bits and pieces of folklore.
I don't think this is a good introduction to Manga but if you are already a fan, you may like this book.

I received a copy of this from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed the stories from this comic. They were loosely based on fairytales or common folklore but I appreciated the twist the author gave them. I’m not sure if it was a scanning thing but the a lot of the text in the graphic novel was often blurred, indecipherable (the explanation of the tarot cards) or just missing. I could piece it together but it was frustrating. To be completely honest, I had an extremely hard time also differentiating between male and female characters. That may be due to my lCk of familiarity with the style and genre. Overall, I’d definitely read the second installment but only if it’s presented in a better format than previous.

It looks like awful lot of pages but something preventing my eReader, going at the last page.

Don't get excited (as me) by looking at amazing cover - the entire book is black and white :(

currently reading....more later...

Update:

Can't read this...not because of story or anything but simply can't read this....fonts not visible, blurred and cannot be magnified....so bad

This is a collection of several volumes and episodes of the manhwa, The Tarot Cafe collected in one volume. I believe there would be 3 volumes.

The Tarot Cafe is a pretty good manhwa with a compelling story and beautiful art. Unfortunately, it's burdened by being too blurry in places (on my iPad) with the smallest text being downright impossible to read on a small screen. Those explain what the tarot cards are and their purpose. After switching and reading on my laptop instead on PDF format, the experience got significantly better. The images and text became more crisp and easier to read. This is great for viewing the gorgeous artwork and enjoying the story better. The scrolling can be tedious, however.

The story revolves around Pamela, a witch and tarot card reader who has the power to see her client's future. She basically helps them out in exchange for a bead. What said beads are for is yet to be explained. Throughout the 500+ page book, there are several episodes explaining several plot threads. Some are smaller than the others, with the bigger ones presumably spanning several volumes. The Tarot Card helps give a glimpse into the clients' pasts and at the end, their future. This takes us to unique and varied settings from a tower, to a Middle Eastern harem, to medieval Europe.

The main plot involving Pamela and her past spans back hundreds of years and ties her back to several characters who appear in several episodes. It's clear that helping her clients would aid her in achieving a certain goal which may be explained further in the next volume. The characters presented are pretty distinct both in looks and personality. Each of the clients have their own stories which are enjoyable to read and I would love to see continued in the next volumes. Still, the story, while incomplete (not surprising for a manhwa) is still good and I can still recommend it.

I will have to recommend that anyone interested get a physical copy though. I originally read this in ePub format which would have brought the overall score down if I hadn't switched to PDF. Otherwise, a large screen and a good display would be a good idea.

Recommended for fans of mangas and graphic novels and those who love a good urban fantasy featuring a witch/Tarot card reader.

I'm sure this would be a really enjoyable read for some people but unfortunately not for me. This collects the first four volumes of a manga series that ran in the early 2000s. The story focuses on a woman who reads tarot cards for other supernatural creatures and the narrative uses the stories of these people to break up the volume into several shorter fairytale-retelling type stories.

It sounds like a really great premise but honestly I would have preferred to just either have the fairytale type stories separate or else only have stories that focus on Pamela. I skimmed through a lot of this because it just wasn't holding my attention but it seems like some of the stories have no relation to Pamela at all while others focus on her and a boy named Ash that she has known for several hundred years. I would have liked it better if the author had chosen one thing or the other to focus on, but other readers might feel differently.

I absolutely love the art though. It's definitely manga-style artwork but it also has a very 90s goth feel that I felt really complemented the whole 'dark fairytale' tone that stories had. However I did think that a lot of the male characters looked REALLY girly, like even more than is usually with anime/manga, so that did cause some confusion as I was trying to figure out whether several characters were men or women.

I really enjoyed it. It is my second manga and i liked it. Interesting story and beautiful illustrations.

This is a hard review to write because I didn't get a chance to really delve into the manga. I really loved the concept, the idea that a tarot reading witch can influence humans and the supernatural alike. I was interested in seeing how the characters interacted, what kind of supernatural creatures would enter her parlor. I got so far as seeing a half-man-half-cat being about to get his tarot read before I completely gave up on attempting to make out what the characters were saying to each other.

The version of the manga I received was incredibly blurry. I couldn't make out more than a few words, and the images were just as terrible. I was so disappointed. I attempted to download it as different formats, and on several different devices (my laptop, iPad and iPhone) but nothing helped. There was no way to stretch or shrink it to make it readable. I hope there might be another version drifting out there that will allow me to read the Manga, I may have to grab a physical copy someday. I think the concept would make it worth it.

I was really expecting something different from the beautifully done cover. The inside artwork, while nice, doesn't match and has a strange layout style at times. This is essentially a collection of short stories following a tarot reader. It does follow an interesting concept of supernatural creatures being helped with a variety of needs. I appreciated the range of characters backgrounds, but you don't really get to delve much into each. Physically, the characters are drawn androgynously and don't stand out much from the pages.

A really clever and interesting concept, together with some beautiful illustrations.
Using a modified deck of Tarot cards to tell the story allows the reader to be taken to the past and to distant corners of the wolf, and meet many magical creatures along the route.

It was actually my first time to read a to-be-released manga and I am happy that Sang-Sun Park's The Tarot Cafe Manga Collection did not disappoint.

Based on a rich history of witchcraft, Tarot Card reading is an art of fortune telling on which a reader tries to read your future based on the cards that will be pick from the tarot deck.

In this book, Park focused on the character of Pamela, a human being gifted with the ability to read someone's future or fate through the tarot cards. Centered on the setting of Tarot Cafe, Pamela has been known to deal with various entities including, but not limited to, supernatural beings such as wish-granting cats, werewolf, and vampires. Throughout her adventure, Pamela met random individuals and discovered stories that made her one of the most-coveted tarot card reader in this manga universe.

What made this book more interesting (aside from its amazing cover) is the life-like illustrations of characters as sketched by TokyoPop's illustrators.

At the end of all this, I noticed that the core of this manga is more focused on tackling the topic of love and how each of us defines it, because at the end of the day, we are all humble characters all willing to do something in the name of love.