Review by Frank Plowright

In Taiwan the Ministry of Culture organise the annual Golden Comics Awards, which is quite the concept to get your head around, and in 2023 Chang Sheng’s Yan picked up the award for Best Comic. Detailed, precise and attractive art certainly makes an immediately good impression, and it’s followed by a shock opening. What seems to be a stage performer caught mid-act is instead a costumed assassin. Welcome to the world of Yan Tieh Hua.

Sheng then flashes back thirty years to the fifteen year old Yan arguing with her actress mother, which she regrets the following day when she comes to the theatre and discovers her mother has been murdered along with the remainder of the opera troupe. For reasons unknown Yan confesses to the killings, at the same time vowing revenge on the killers.

Yan is a series demanding readers go with the flow. Sheng introduces further strangeness without explanation, such as the way Yan goes free and a talking ancestral spirit trapped in an origami construction. It’s all explained, but patience is required. Yan is a veritable whirlwind of action and she’s on a mission, so it’s not as if there’s not enough going on in the meantime to distract us. Like the art, which is magnificent. Sheng is influenced by more detailed manga, but is particularly expressive with people, and comes up with great visual signatures such as the mask worn by one character. Yan in her opera performer persona is memorable, as is the dissolute former police detective called back onto the force to investigate her livestreamed killings.

He’s introduced as Yan goes public, except police records state when fifteen she was taken to an experimental facility where it was reported she died ten years later. Yet she seems alive, and certainly not looking middle-aged. That, to begin with, is an minor anomaly in what’s otherwise an exaggerated, but possible series of events. As the volume continues, though, greater and greater steps are taken toward the impossible. There’s a girl who can see into the future, along with Yan’s astonishing athleticism and gymnastic talent.

It’s all extremely captivating, and with even more mysteries introduced than mentioned, anyone reading Yan will be counting the days until the next volumes is released.