This was what Neil Gaiman created for a TV show in Britain. I've seen the show, but it was not very memorable. It was inventive enough to intrigue me, so I was interested in reading this graphic novel when I saw it on the library shelf.
I should say up front that I'm not a big fan of Gaiman's work. I tried reading one of his novels a while ago and gave up on it, but I did really enjoy the episode he wrote for Doctor Who during Matt Smith's tenure.
In true comic book tradition, women are exploited. All the male characters are almost uniformly completely dressed, whereas the bulk of the females are depicted in various states of undress or skimpy dress at best. The main character, the one we meet first, is Door. She's of the portico family, and as the names suggest, they have the ability to find portals where you wouldn't expect them.
Door's family has been wiped out, and she is on the run from Messrs Croup and Vandemar, who are trying to complete their extermination of her family by killing her. Door is also trying to learn who ordered her family's extermination, so she can get some payback. I don't recall how she was dressed in the TV show and I haven't read the novel, so I can only go by what the graphic artist has drawn and here, she's depicted inexplicably wearing combat boots, stockings, and a short skirt with an overcoat. Barf.
The graphics are good, and the coloring is perfect for the mood, but the lettering I had issues with. At one point, where Croup and Vandemar are depicted approaching the reader in a long tunnel, the speech is written so tiny as to be illegible. It was a gimmick to indicate their distance, which was already patent from the image, so it failed. More than this, the letterer evidently felt a need to embolden at least one word in every single speech balloon, and the chosen words were evidently random. It was annoying and distracting. I can't recommend this approach at all.
You really have to know a bit about London to get the most out of this. Without that geographical knowledge and an appreciation of how long London's history truly is, you won't get the most out of Gaiman's playfulness with the names of various London places and landmarks.
That was, I'm sorry to say, really the best thing about it. Watch the made for TV move instead - that's where it all started. Everything else is just - how did Mel Brooks put it in Spaceballs? The Search for More Money!
