Author/Editor: Jeremy Brown
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is reward aplenty!
I requested this thinking it was a children's story book and wondering how the writer and publisher had avoided copyright infringement from Mattel over their Transformers. I soon discovered how: this is a Transformers parody, and not at all for children. That settled I launched into it liking the idea and finding it amusing, but I soon grew tired of it.
One reason for this was the disorganized way this book was put together. Some stories were amusing, others would have been amusing had they not dragged out so much. Others were not amusing at all. Too much of it was unintelligible. The book looks like it was almost literally thrown together with no effort put into making it look decent or visually appealing, which is ninety percent of a graphic novel in my book. Perhaps this was deliberate, but it failed to impress me, much less engage me.
One major problem was the quality of the images and text. It was very poor. Even on a 15" monitor it was impossible to read the text in far too many frames, and I was not about to start enlarging it to the point where I'd have to slide the bar up and down for every page in order to read all of it, so I skipped a lot of pages where the writing was unintelligible or blurry.
Though this was an advance review copy, there was nothing in the copy I received to indicate that this was a low-res version, so I was left with the idea that the final copy would be as bad as this copy was. It left me with a real appreciation for those who do comic book lettering, since I've never had this problem before.
This book also had the problem I've complained about before in that there's too much white space. Each pager had way too much white space. If you're going to do your images that small, then make your comic a smaller format! Don't take it out on the trees! Naturally this makes no difference in an ebook, and I can appreciate that for artistic or dramatic effect, some pages are not going to be filled.
Filling every page purely for the sake of it is dumb, but in cases like this, where there is a standard set of panels on almost every page, and acres of white space surrounding them, then the book size is too large! OTOH, larger images would have improved readability. Either way this design was poor.
Overall, I was not at all pleased by this work and I cannot in good faith recommend it.
