Author: Ken Niimura
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
I think this is the last of three manga I'll be reading for a while (I say that because I still have two more to get through and now, I'm not looking forward to those! I don't know what it is, but the Japanese graphic novels seem way too juvenile for my taste. This one in particular seemed like it was aimed at middle-graders (and maybe it was) but that said, there was really nothing in it at all to entertain a more mature taste. Note that I read this with my middle-grade son, and he got just as little out of it as I did.
This novel consists of thirteen "chapters" most of which have little, if anything, to do with one another, although there is a thread here and there which is shared. The stories are very short, and really have no ending. Indeed, they were so abrupt in some cases that I seriously wondered if pages were missing.
The stories themselves weren't interesting. Yes, a bit here and there was entertaining, a couple of bits made me laugh, and some of the art work was nice, but overall I was bored to tears reading this. I use the term 'reading' very loosely because there isn't very much to read. A whole bunch of frames and even panels have no text, which is fine if the images convey the story, but most of the time I was scratching my head wondering what the heck was happening.
This book also annoyed me through it's poor use of white space. It was a standard comic book format, but the images left huge margins (at least in the iPad, on the Bluefire Reader). With an ebook, this isn't a problem, but I feel for the wasted trees if this goes into a print run, with all that white space wrenched from some poor tree and then going unused.
I can't recommend this graphic novel.
