Rating: WARTY!
This is form an advance review copy for which i thank the publisher.
This I got thinking it looked interesting, but in the end it was truly a confusing read and contained nothing that entertained me. It's the kind of comic book which makes it clear that 'issue' has more than one meaning, and you do not want to be publishing an issue which has issues! The story is about Morrey Gibbs who is effectively King Midas. Almost everything he touches turns to gold, but there seems to be no rule as to how and when it happens. Why he has this power remained a mystery to me throughout the graphic novel.
On top of this, the story is set in Waterworld, but thankfully without Kevin Costner. Morrey has a pet otter which immediately turned me off the story. I detest stories of any stripe that feature oh-so-cute animal sidekicks, because it is way overdone. I much prefer writers who take the road less traveled, but this author evidently has absolutely no idea where that road is.
On top of that, there's the stock inventor friend, and at that point I gave up. I honestly cannot tell you what the story is about because I have no idea despite gamely plowing through to the end. It was that confusing. Morrey is apparently trying to avoid bounty hunters, but since he can create all the gold he wants out of literally anything, he could have bought off those guys (or conversely, turned them into god), and also the guy who hired them. In fact, he could have flooded the world with so much gold that it made gold literally worthless, but he was evidently too stupid to figure any of that out. Stupid main characters are ten-a-penny, especially in young adult novels. The world does not need them appearing in graphic novels, too. So the book was simply a mess and I cannot recommend it.
On a technical note, it's increasingly clear to me that comic book authors have not yet clued-in to the fact that books are published electronically and the book had better work on a pad. Instead, both they and publishers are still evidently unable to think outside the box: the cardboard box in which print issues are snail-mailed. They're landlocked in a print world, and if that's the case, they should quit trying to publish electronic versions and send the reviewers a print version.
This story was rendered even more irritating than it already was by two problems. The first of these was that the screen image was significantly smaller than my iPad screen, and the text illegible until I'd enlarged it, but once enlarged, Bluefire Reader (my reader of choice for ebooks, since Amazon's crappy Kindle app truly sucks, and virtually no one offers review books in B&N's much better Nook app), would not let me swipe the page until I had reduced it back to it's original tiny size! This was irritating at best. Publishers really need to take the time to smell what they're shoveling out to people.
A second problem was that some pages, for reasons unknown at least as judged by their actual content, were 'printed' at ninety degrees to upright, and the since pads are programmed to re-orient instantly when they're turned, the image merely shrank when the pad was turned to read it unless I took pains to keep it completely flat. Yes, you can lock the image, but his can create other problems so i typically do not do this except with Amazon's truly crappy Kindle app, which is useless for reading anything other than plain text anyway. This re-orientation once again made the images too small! Frustrating at best.
So, a note to authors and publishers: if you're going to offer your graphic novel in electronic format, give some thought to how it's created and what it will look like in the intended reading environment for the sake of your readers - if you want to keep them reading your work, that is. But disregarding the technical issues, I can't recommend this based on the poorly put-together content.
