Rating: WARTY!
This is the first volume of a graphic novel series that I picked up as much as a joke as through interest in reading it (I'm not a fan of employing antiquated Roman numerals for anything!). I figured, though, since I’ve reviewed 21, so why not review 13?! Maybe I should be looking for other graphic novels with odd numbers as the title, too? Do a whole series?! Unfortunately, this one did not engage me like 21 Down did.
Some people have drawn comparisons between this and The Bourne Identity. I never read the novel for that; I've seen only the movie, so the parallels did not strike me as much as others, although they do have a good point. For me, this story was rather too clichéd: a stranger waking up with no memory of who he was, and suddenly there’s a government conspiracy and he’s supposedly an assassin, and people are out to kill him. Then he’s apparently rescued by friendlies, but it turns out they’re not so friendly after all. They think he’s part of a conspiracy and want to know who is at the head of it. They don’t seem to believe that he’s lost his memory.
The artwork wasn’t bad per se, but it was curiously dated - like it had been drawn by artists in the thirties and forties. That might have been fine in the right context, but here it felt wooden and static to me – out of keeping with the action story it illustrated. The story itself was trite and the characters flat and uninteresting, so I quickly grew bored with it and have no interest in pursuing this at all.
