Saturday, April 2, 2016

Spellcheckers by James S Rich


Rating: WORTHY!

With decent line-drawing art by Nicolas Hittori De, this small format graphic novel entertained me sufficiently to call it a worthy read. The story is about these bad-ass femmes in school who have zero respect for anything and an awesome line of wise-cracks. I laughed out loud and often as I watched them effortlessly take on two guys who were causing trouble at the school.

The only oddball point was the art by Joƫlle Jones. She did the cover and flashbacks in the interior, and her cover picture of the three main characters bore no relationship whatsoever to the ones actually in the story. I know there is room for variation between artists, but in this case they were very effectively different characters. They looked much older and less rough-around-the -edges, so it felt a bit like bait and switch - or in the case jailbait and switch judged by the apparent age discrepancy! If I had seen a cover illustration indicative of the characters inside the comic, I might not have opened it to see what the story was like, because it would have felt like I was looking at a story aimed at a much younger audience, and I would have missed this story then!

As it happened, I was very intrigued by the title, and I was able to look inside and read a small portion of it, so I knew what was coming and I approved, and bought it. It just seemed a bit odd to me, is all. It felt like picking up a comic which sported an illustration of Batman on the cover, and then finding out it was really about the young Bruce Wayne before he ever became Batman, or picking up a Justice League volume only to find the interior is really about the teen Titans! Just so's you know! Other than that I rated this well-worth reading.