Reading Story of the Tao #1 was a lot like watching badly-dubbed martial arts flicks. The story doesn't make a lot of sense, and I can't always follow who the characters are, but the action is fantastic. The highlight of this book is the artwork by Andy Seto, which is spectacular and colorful, and which really brings across the motion and energy of the fight scenes which define the story. Unfortunately, this beautiful artwork is married to a story and characters that don't make any sense at all to me, with the general notion of a war between martial arts schools being clear but the motivations, and even the simplest notions of who we're supposed to be rooting for, are completely inscrutable.
From what I can gather, Story of the Tao seems to follow a similar basic plotline to that of many, many kung-fu flicks that come out of Asia. Rival schools, all convinced that they hold the way to true enlightenment, come into conflict. The general conflict, made up of four different religious factions, would seem simple enough, but Kin Lau and Chen throw in references to "evil Buddhists" and "evil Taoists" as if that's meant to mean something, have one of the leads slapping around someone who seems to belong to his religion, and generally fail to identify what any of the characters are actually seeking.
Then again, the story is hardly the point of this story. It's merely a bridging sequence between different fight sequences, and all of those are spectacular. Seto's colors are beautiful to behold, and he does not skimp on the detail in the martial arts maneuvers or channeled energy that results. As the characters call out flowery names for their techniques, energy and deadly blows are dished out, and you believe that these characters are striking with supernatural force. It's reminiscent of Dragonball Z in that way, except that Seto's work holds a little more realism in the basic anatomy and also has a violence that feels more visceral and less cartoony.
I have my complaints with the artwork as well, however. Comicsone has "flipped" the manga to read left to right, but the translation wasn't perfect, and so there are several sequences that have arrows to indicate that they are to be read in a right to left order. The constant switch of reading one direction and then another was grating, and I found myself wishing that they had either retained the original right-to-left style or gone all the way with the mirror technique. Seto also has a stylistic technique that got on my nerves, bringing in an attempt at humor against the backdrop of the more serious violence by using super-deformed versions of the characters. While this stylistic tic may work fine for manga readers, it looked bizarre to these western eyes, and was especially jarring because it seemed to give the book an inconsistency in tone.
I'm not what you call a hardcore fan of manga, and I'm really not a fan of anime or Hong Kong action flicks, which seems to put me squarely out of the target market for Story of the Tao. Those who have outgrown Dragonball Z and are looking for a more adult-oriented orgy of violence, or those who can enjoy an afternoon marathon of barely comprehensible, badly dubbed Hong Kong action flicks for the beauty of their choreography, might find it more to their liking.
