Garden Club Detectives is a PG webcomic currently topping the webcomic charts. It’s a suspense manga about Yeon transferring to a new school and trying to fit in, eventually joining the gardening club.
This is currently being promoted on the webtoon’s site as one of the top mystery manga, so I’d love to check it out!
content
Yeon-han is a young girl who was taken out of Seoul by her family to live in a more remote town. In the car, she laments to us that “even a middle school student” and she knows what that means—the cost of living in Seoul is too high. Meaning, she worries that her family is poor.
Despite this, Yeon Han is a very confident and pompous girl. On her first day, she nominates herself as class representative, losing out to the other girls due to a popularity contest. She also tried to join various clubs, and although her skills were unrivaled, she was rejected due to the fear of being outclassed or dominated by her classmates. Meanwhile, Yeon doesn’t care which club she joins, as long as she can become the club’s president.
As she was moping around the school she spotted Saessak, a big girl happily working in the garden. It was here that she decided that the Gardening Club would be a very easy one to take over and get up and running.
We learn that Saessak is indeed a member, but there is another member, a boy and girl named Beokji. Including Yeon, they need one more member to officially become a club. Their prayers are answered when Mirim, a girl from Yeon’s class, recognizes her at the clubhouse. Saessak tells Yeon that Merrill is weird and can talk to spirits, but Yeon happily invites Merrill after she learns that Merrill voted for her in the class election.
The gardening club with four members is formally formed.
Soon, we see a disturbing revelation; as there is a dead body in the garden. Not fresh corpses, don’t worry – human bones. Yeon also finds a diary taped under a table in the garden club’s warehouse, and while reading it, she discovers a murder confession.
The rest of the comic serves as the girls slowly unravel the murder. Going through the list of suspects, and with the help of Baizhi, Meilin and Saise, Yan feels that she is getting closer to the identity of the murderer.
Oddly, we the audience are actually (apparently) told who the killer is before the girls realize it. Some visual clues tell us that “Canteen Oppa”—a handsome young man who works in the school cafeteria—may be the killer.
The manga ends in episode 6, with a wealthy school benefactor visiting the campus. She lined up for the gardening club and took off her shoes, jokingly noting that when crops seemed to be dying, “it didn’t change”. However, she found a tomato that seemed to be doing really well thanks to calcium deposits in the ground.
Now, you may be asking what is calcium? Excellent. Bones, of course. Yes, there are more bones.
Opinion/Analysis
I can’t help but feel sad about how this manga ended. I’m not sure why it ends like this; According to the Baka-updates Manga, The actual manga has 53 chapters. Whereas on the webtoon, the story ends with only 6 and it ends abruptly.
Now, I suspect this is a season finale with only 6 issues. So my only guess is that Webtoon has dropped the official translation of this story and will not continue it.
Now, there are probably other unconventional ways to read fanfic translations of this manga, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested. But I can’t help but wonder why the webtoon would drop it. It has a webtoon rating of 9.74 and millions of views; so why?
Do you think Webtoon will reconsider? What do you think of this story? Let us know in the comments!
For more webtoon reviews, check out our other reviews on LAN!
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