Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This graphic novel was great! It featured a superhero named Mr Invincible, and it was amusing because the creator of it had 'cheated' on the way such stories are typically told, and I loved it. Written and illustrated by a Belgian creator, and published natively as Imbattable: Justice et Legumes Frais ("Unbeatable: Justice and Fresh Vegetables<"), this book will be available in English come September.
In small ways it reminded me of the time in one of my rat books that Louise and Thelma saw themselves performing on stage in a presentation they were doing. There is also a running story that I have yet to finish where these letters escape from a speech balloon and were running around in a couple of books. I think in the next one I do in alphabetical order, I'll bring that story to a conclusion. It's always fun though, to see others exploiting this kind of out of the box - or out of the panel - thinking.
Normally a graphic novel proceeds sequentially in a series of small panels filling each page, but Mr Invincible's power was that he could move from one panel to another out of sequence, and use things in later panels to help himself in an earlier one. In one story, for example, there was a cat stuck in a tree, so he reaches down from one row of panels into the row below and easily plucks the cat from the top of the tree; then he it hands back to its owner. Of course, the owner now has two cats and must surely ponder whether a cat in the hand is worth a second in the bush, but there's a solution to that!
I don't want to spoil the joy of reading this, so let me confine myself to revealing that there are stories where speech balloons are in play, where comic book colors are exploited, and where even the page itself cannot stop the action! And not all of his stories end well. Of course you can only play these tricks in so many different ways before you run out of truly original ideas, so I have to say it was a credit to the writer that he was able to think up engaging ways to exploit this. I'm not sure how you could sustain a series like this indefinitely, but maybe that's not his plan. I definitely became hooked though, so maybe there is a great future for such storytelling.
It's also a credit to the writer that he could figure out what were rather complex and inventive story executions in some of these stories. I had access only to the e-version of the book which took away from the power of some of the stories. I imagine it would work better in a print comic than it did in the ebook, but still it made for a fun read, and it was definitely different! I commend this fully as a very worthy read.
