just got back from camping out in the campus bookstore... ( in the process of reading the two volumes that were available, one and two, i embarrassed myself horribly by snorting VERY LOUDLY at a part that was only mildly funny
)
and now about 'One'...
basic summary - Eumpa One, a young musical genius begins attending high school in Korea after his family moves there from the US. Eumpa is half Korean and half American. his mother was a famous actress and his father a famous musician who combined pop-style music with classical instruments, but in reality hates pop music with a passion. a few popular Korean pop stars attend the same high school as Eumpa, including Jenny You, a pop-princess. Jenny struggles with her dislike of the princess/doll image forced upon her by her mother, since she is actually a fairly edgy person. Jenny is used to all the fan-boys at the high school drooling over her, and is surprised that Eumpa isn't interested in her, but rather in a plain-jane girl Young-Ju. one of Eumpa's teachers, a music teacher, discover's Eumpa's musical talents and tricks Eumpa into writing a song for a tv drama, which the teacher ends up passing off as his own.
in the second volume, Eumpa gives Young-Ju a CD he recorded of himself singing several popular Korean pop songs (which turns out to be a love-letter in the guise of a CD - awww). Jenny gets ahold of the CD and gives it to her record company. the teacher who stole Eumpa's song confesses on national tv what he did, but doesn't identify the student, creating a sort of mass hysteria among record companies to find the musician. Jenny says something to Eumpa that makes him realize his potential as a musician, and he begins to consider actually being one. Eumpa's father finds out that Eumpa is interested in writing and playing pop music, and not in being manipulated by his father... and kicks Eumpa out of the house. eventually, Jenny convinces Eumpa to go with her to her recording company to discuss signing on with them.
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is it any good? - yes, pretty good. it shows what struggles pop-stars go through in their real lives, dealing with images that they are forced to assume, dealing with fans and anti-fans, dealing with other pop-stars. the art is also pretty good. (the artist frequently has little drawings of herself doing things throughout the manhwa, wearing a doctor's mask)
any downsides? - yes. there is some foul language, fairly minor though, no 'f' word usage. some of the female pop-stars and managers wear rather risque outfits, but nothing you wouldn't see in modern pop-culture in America... (which really isn't saying much), but there is no nudity. Jenny knows that she has an influence over guys and taunts some about it. Jenny's mother is also a bit wierd, and tells her that she will go to hell for listening to hard-rock music (this may be because Jenny's father, who is divorced from her mother, is an aging hard-rocker). one of the other pop-stars at the high school is a rapper-girl, who is a transvestite with quite a few fan-girls. Jenny picks on the rapper-girl because she considers her to be a pervert, her fans to be perverts, and thinks that if she becomes friends with her that she will be a pervert as well. also, Eumpa is photographed by a magazine, which has mistaken him for a girl. there are also a few places where there are translation problems, or just plain typos, but nothing more than gramatical problems.
-personally, i found none of the downsides to be
real problems other than the foul language, the transvestite rapper-girl, and Jenny's mother. but i listed anything that could be a potential problem for anyone else.
is it worth it to buy it? depends - if you are totally anti-pop culture, you probably wouldn't like 'One,' but if you aren't bothered by or like pop-culture shojo stories, you may like 'One.' it wasn't good enough to make me run around recommending that people should go out and buy it 'right now', but it was good enough to get me interested in reading the third and possibly fourth volumes. if it is available at a store near you, i would probably encourage you to do what i did - camp out - and decide for yourself.
here is a link to it:
'One' by Lee Vin @ amazon.com
no wonder it took me so long to find it... 
