Author: Steve Niles
Publisher: IDW
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Damien Worm.
This is another advance review copy of a comic book which arrived without a cover or any material listing the writers, artists, and so on. The first page is the first page of the story. You know I could understand ARC books coming out in the past without a cover if it wasn't ready yet, but there really is no excuse whatsoever in this electronic age for having no cover. Even if the cover art isn't yet done (and I'd have to wonder why, especially for a genre which places great stock in cover art), it's perfectly simple thing to put a blank cover with a note on it explaining the problem.
Normally, I'd also wonder if creators spent less time self-indulgently creating myriad cover variants, they might have one to spare for the actual cover, but in this case, even that doesn't apply since there is no back cover or variant art in the back either! That works for me, but it still doesn't excuse a lack of any sort of cover.
Having said that, the art work was interesting, if tending towards muddy earth tones too much. It used the full page, so no wasted trees here in the print version. It looks almost like it was done in water colors, which was a cool idea - or at least was done in a computerized mimic of water colors. For my taste, though, it was way too dark, and the text, once again, was really hard to read in the iPad in Bluefire Reader.
I think graphic novel creators still think nostalgically in terms of print books and that's a mistake. Reading it in Adobe Digital reader on a 19" monitor, which renders the image roughly the same size as a print comic, still gave some problems but was a lot more legible than the iPad view.
The story felt really hard to get into - and this is volume one! It felt like I came into something in progress, or had started reading volume two by mistake. There was very little given to guide the reader to what was happening or why. The first part of it which started making any sense was page fourteen where "Miss Vivian" comes home from her last day of high school, disgusted with all the frivolous behavior. On that score I can relate to her, and her description of the events as a "selfie apocalypse" was funny to me. She's so disillusioned with school hat she flatly refuses to go to the graduations ceremony.
The large house in which she lives - with a servant yet! - is reputed to be haunted. The dark deep-hued coloring now seemed to work a lot better. I like the way the artist brought reds into it, suggestive of blood, perhaps? Vivian's brother Geoff has finally managed to trap a spirit - in the closet! It's bound magically, so Vivian gets to open the closet door to see it, which was amusing. Shades of Harry Potter in the dark Arts class in Prisoner of Azkaban. They plan on letting it go. I'm not sure I would, given how the spirit looks, but this is just a proof of concept thing for them. They have some deal going for which they need their father's approval, and Geoff now believes they can get it, given his success here.
That part was winning back my favor, but then we abruptly quit the story for a few pages to go off elsewhere and I was lost again, and just beginning to become annoyed when we switched right back to Geoff and Vivian and the arrival of their father. I'm getting whiplash here! The demon which is supposedly trapped attacks their father and the only way they can scare it off is to show it its own reflection in a hand mirror, which causes it to flee, but Geoff and Vivian think their father's behavior is weird, not the fact that they had a pet demon! That was funny.
So, a bunch of mixed feelings about this, especially towards the negative need of the spectrum when I began it, but I grew increasingly favorable towards it as I read through it. This felt like an extended prologue more than anything else and I despise prologue sin regular novels. This one did introduce us to the family, but we learned very little about them and what's going on in their world. Volume two needs to come through with a lot more solid explanation about exactly what this world is and how it works. That said, I feel fine rating this as a worthy read with the caveats I've mentioned borne firmly in mind.
