“Read this card or be red carded.”

With the World Cup just around the corner, there's no better time to pick up a soccer (or, so I don't insult anyone outside the U.S. who might be reading this - football) manga, or in this case a manhwa (Korean manga) called Angel Cup. I will state right up front that I don't know much about the game. Oh, I tried once, in 1994, during the World Cup that year. There was such a marketing blitz about soccer that my friends and I felt we should check it out. What does the rest of the world know that we were missing out on?

We fell asleep before twenty minutes had gone by.

One of my co-workers, a Manchester United fan through-and-through, is determined to get me to understand this game, and enjoy the World Cup this year. For my part, I'm willing to try. It should be obvious, whether you're a fan or not, that soccer truly is the world's sport, enjoyed by nearly every country on the globe. So there's obviously something going on I'm just not getting. I was excited to show my friend Angel Cup when I got it. Hey, it's a soccer book….just because there's a cute girl in a short skirt on the cover doesn't mean it's not a good book, right? Well, we'll see on that one, but I enjoyed it.

You've read this kind of story before. A woman with the desire to be all that she can be faces adversity from her boyfriend, her classmates and her rivals, but is determined to outshine everyone and become the greatest at (insert sport, pastime or activity here), and is assisted along the way by a rag-tag group of people who beat the odds to become the best. In this case, it's all about football. So-Jin is a girl who's really good at it, but not as good as her rival, Shin-bee, who's beaten her enough times that she's all but given up on the sport.

A dying sports legend puts it in his will that fifty percent of his assets will go to fund girls' soccer, and suddenly So-Jin finds herself back in the game. A few traded insults with members of the boys' soccer team at her school leads to a co-ed confrontation, and forces So-Jin to find a team willing to take them on. Again, if you've read one sports story, you've read them all, and Angel Cup's not about to break any new ground here. Her team is comprised of several misfits and outsiders, and at least by the end of this first volume, it's hard to call them a team at all.

Thing is, this book works, better than most sports manga I've read. So-Jin is a great character, juggling her passion for the game with the fear that her less-than-supportive boyfriend will dump her if her thighs get too big to look good in a skirt. Each of the aforementioned misfits and outsiders that make up her team has a background that this first volume didn't have space to really tell much about, but you leave this book curious to find out more. Even So-Jin's rival, Shin-bee appears as the manager for the opposing team, though it's difficult to know whose side she's really on this early in the game.

Manga purists seem to thumb their collective noses at manhwa, but there are some really great titles they're missing out on, and Angel Cup is one of them. The artwork is as dynamic and out-and-out cool as anything you'll pick up from Japan, and the story, while following a fairly common path, gives us enough characters to actually care about that the trip is still worth it. The book doesn't shy away from showing blood on the field or the occasional fan-service, so buyer beware on those aspects, but overall, this book made even a soccer neophyte like myself want to get into the game. Heck, I'm even ready to sit down and watch a couple World Cup matches this summer.