Rating: WARTY!
It's day three of the July Smack-Down, and we have Girl Genius up against Wonder Woman. I have to tell you that I'd take a girl genius over a buxom wench any day of the week, including weekends, but I shall try to remain neutral if not neutered here! Girl Genius is a rather strange steam-punk graphic novel which left me feeling unsure about how to rate it, quite frankly, but having sat back and considered the various aspects of how this was put together, I have to rate it negatively overall. I liked the idea of it, but the execution was poor. Events were rather confusing, and the stereotyped pseudo-German characters of indefinable genealogy, but laughable speech patterns were a major turn-off.
I loved the basic idea of the main character, but it took too long for her to start showing her real self, and once she began, the comic ended, which was annoying in the extreme. Agatha "Clay", whose real name is quite obviously Agatha Heterodyne is your stereotypical trope character - raised with her true nature (as a "spark" some sort of wizard engineer, presumably, although it's never really explained) kept hidden from her, and even when danger looms, no one has the smarts to clue her in as to what's going on. This was clichéd and pathetic, frankly. It's tired, it's been done a gibbonillion times, please find something new to share with us!
It was hard to place Agatha. She started out as some sort of student or apprentice, but she didn't look or behave like one. Was she supposed to be a teen? Is this YA? If it is, the authors seriously missed their mark, because she doesn't remotely look like a teen. I note that other reviewers have said she looks more like a barmaid or something, and I have to agree. To me she looked like the loose-morals, rambunctious, buxom, adventurous, unfaithful wife of some straight-laced guy who, when her hubby is away, indulges liberally in rampant affairs with the milkman, the window cleaner, the mail carrier, or whoever, in some British straight-to-video sex romp movie.
I appreciate this if it was an honest attempt to break that stupid dumb blonde cliché, but that aside, her appearance was completely wrong, and I wonder if this was opportunity was squandered because they wanted Agatha to look like the female half of the writing duo? That was a mistake. Not because there's anything wrong with the female (or the male) half of the writing duo, and certainly not that the female half looks like she might be the character I described above, but because this particular character demanded a certain kind of look, and for me, she was robbed. She doesn't work as depicted.
The villain was interesting in that he really didn't seem very much like a villain - just a very anal guy who wasn't so bad really, although I suspect we haven't seen the worst side of him. One of my big problems with this story though, was that it really didn't flow. I'm sure the authors knew where the story was going and how it all fit together, but it moved with such a lack of grace, and with such staccato twitches and stutters that it was reminiscent of a badly-designed steam-driven robot, and it was really an uncomfortable read for me. It took a long time to start to feel like I had any good idea of what was really going on in this world, and by then the story was pretty much over. It's very short which on this occasion was a blessing.
For me, the art work was clean and well done, brown and white line drawings and some shading which was definitely a saving grace if perhaps a bit simplistic, but I liked it. That said, and without a coherent and enjoyable story, it's all just pretty pictures, and for this reason I can't honestly rate this as a worthy read. It might have been better as a regular novel, but then it wouldn't have the cachet of being a graphic novel, would it? It's a pity that too many people sell-out to graphics when they'd be better off buying into some heavier writing with fewer pictures, pretty or otherwise. This one smacked itself down.
