Rating: WARTY!
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This was available on net Galley as a 'read now' and sometimes such books can be gems; other times they can be awful; upon another occasion, they can be simply just not appealing. This was in the latter category, I'm sorry to report. mat Kindt's writing was nothing out of the ordinary - not bad, but not really anything new or special. The drawings (ink by Ryan Winn, pencil by Trevor Hairsine) were okay, but nothing thrilling. Colors by David Baron were brilliantly hued, but still failed to impress somehow.
This new world felt drab despite the bright colors. It felt confusing, and uninteresting, and full of vague new-ageisms instead of anything solid or gripping. The story is of a black couple whose child is taken into this parallel dimension (or whatever it was) to replace an 'observer' who was killed. The only observation worth making here is that he evidently didn't see it coming!
The way the child was drawn made him look far older than the way he was depicted through his behavior. I don't know if any of these artists have young children of their own, but they should probably study a few crawling kids before they draw any more of them.
This death of the observer creates a panic for reasons which are entirely unclear. The rest of the story is of a battle between human cavemen who wish everyone to have self-determination, and the parallel world people who apparently don't. The bottom line is that none of us truly has free will (changes have occurred in our brains long before our conscious mind becomes aware of us making a decision), so if the people in this story had been less new age mysticism, and more science-based empiricism, they would have realized their conflict was pointless! I couldn't get anything out of what proved to be a very forgettable graphic novel, and I cannot recommend it.
On a technical note, my iPad, using Bluefire Reader, had issues with disappearing speech on pages 8, 60, and 77 (as measured by the Bluefire Reader page count - the graphic novel has no page numbering. When I loaded this into Adobe Digital editions, however, the text was there =- there were no blank speech balloons, so be aware of this issue.
