Rating: WARTY!
I wrote positively of the first comic in this series by Sarah Vaughn and Jonathan Luna, but then I didn't get a chance to read more until this closing issue came along as an ARC, so at least I can book-end it! I have to say I was a lot less thrilled with this one than I was with the first one. I am wondering if that's because I've encountered two more stories of this nature, both of which were very, very good.
The first of these was the movie Ex Machina which was really remarkable and extremely inventive. The second was the British TV series Humans which again was a delight. This last comic in the Alex + Ada series came off looking very poor in comparison with those other two visual media, both in imagery and in story-telling.
The art work was still good - very simple with clean lines, but the images were a bit flat and static. I'd noticed this in the first comic, but was willing to let that slide because I enjoyed the story. This aspect of this comic stood out much more starkly given that the story was far less engaging here.
On at least one occasion, the entire page, which contained five frames stacked one above the other, contained exactly the same image in every frame - or if there were changes they were so subtle that they were lost on me. Other pages had seemingly repetitive images, too, but not quite this bad. In addition to this, some of the text was so small it was really hard to read on my iPad without the irritation of enlarging and re-sizing the page. My iPad is quite large, but still slightly smaller than your standard comic book page. Comic book and graphic novel writers forget this at their peril when releasing their work in e-format. The two media - print comic and e-comic - are very different and cannot be approached in the same way. I've yet to see a comic which appreciates this and takes advantage of the e-format.
I caught one grammar issue where the phrase "less people" was employed. It should be "fewer people". Here's the writing issue, though: is this something in the narration, or in someone's speech? If it's in a speech (or in first person narration), then it can be "correctly incorrect", because most people do not employ stringently correct grammar in their speech - something which far too many writers tend to forget.
However, in this case, we also have to ask if the character who was speaking was a human - in which case we might expect less than exact grammar, or an android, in which case, wouldn't it have been programmed with correct grammar, even if it's also programmed to speak more colloquially? It's a good question which writers need to think about! I don't know in this case if this question entered the writer's mind or not, but it certainly should have. Writers should be always aware of these things whether they choose to take advantage of them in their story-telling or not.
Overall, I found the story disappointing. Given the changes in society, Alex's extreme prison sentence made no sense - that it was so long to begin with, and that he got no reprieve when societal attitudes changed. The story itself was very predictable, so the ending was absolutely no surprise whatsoever to me - unlike the Ex Machina movie which was far from predictable.
The problem for me with the predictability is that the story didn't have anything new or interesting to offer and I felt rather cheated of a good story, especially given how promisingly this series began. I've read a lot of stories about human and machine interaction and seen a lot of movies on the topic, as well as read science books about these things, so maybe I demand more than the average reader, but I still can't help but feel that this needed a stronger story even for less demanding or discriminating readers, and it's for this reason that I can't recommend it.
