Rating: WARTY!
I got misled by this. The blurb mentioned origami and the cover image looked like a paper sculpture, so I got the impression that maybe the art work was paper sculpture, which intrigued me greatly. No - it wasn't - not even close! It was just regular art work (which wasn't very good) and only the cover (and one or two sample pieces of art work inside) were paper sculptures (or computer simulations of such).
The 'origami' part is the name of an organization featured in the fiction. I was disappointed, and still await the first graphic paper sculpture novel(!), but I was nonetheless still ready for a good story. The problem with this is the same as I had with other graphic novels I've read over the last few days - persistence of memory of the story was absent in three out of four, and it wasn't even because the stories were alike. The stories were each different from the others - just not memorable! The one I did remember was a bit of a surprise because I wasn't sure I'd like it at all.
This particular story is a rather tedious collection of ladder panels - five frames per page, like a really slow badly cut movie running past the reader. The frames were interleaved, too - the red alternating with the blue, depicting two different scenes - on the first page, like we couldn't guess this without the coloring. This format gave every frame a squashed, cramped feeling which wasn't pleasant to look at, and which went on almost unbroken for the first dozen and more pages, which contained zero text at all. I could only make random guesses at what was supposed to be happening here, and this failed to fill me with warmth or confidence.
The random ticking and beeping, creeping, leaking, seeping out of the image didn't help, and when the text put in an appearance close to page 20, it contributed nothing. This marked a fifth of the way through this novel and I had got nothing out of it at all. The truly hilarious thing was that after zero text, when the speech balloons first appeared, they contained zero text in my advance review copy as shown in Bluefire reader on the iPad! I do not think this was intentional. I think it was a flaw in the process which converted this to e-format. I've seen this in other comic books and it's really annoying.
The next page did bring actual text, and we meet Rain, who is in the middle or running somewhere and asking for a favor, but before we can even get into what her story is, we're whisked away from that to a different setting, speech is gone, and all we have is descriptive boxes in the ladder frames. This lack of a story and the creative team's quite evident reluctance to offer one brought me from mild annoyance to full-on irritation. We're now at a "beam me up Scotty" station, and the favor is apparently a free ride for Rain, but to where? Why? Why can't she afford to pay? Why the urgency? Where's she going? I moved at this point from "Who knows?" to "Who cares?" I lost patience with the angry, regimented artwork and the complete lack of a story at getting close to half way through this, and I decided my time was being wasted here. I cannot recommend this one.
