Author: Jay Faerber
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Scott Godlewski.
Colors by Ron Riley.
Latters by Thomas Mauer.
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!
This is slightly longer than volume 1, at 77 pages, and it gets right into the action immediately. There's no introductory stuff at all (not even a front cover in my ARC!), so I was perforce working under an assumption that the creation team as the same as for volume one (which later proved to be the case when I dug up a cover for volume two). The series runs to at least seven volumes - probably more by now!
In this volume I began to really get into the characters and the story, and they were morphing before my very eyes. The hero, Clara Bronson turns out to be rather prejudiced and her deputy, Budroxofinicus, turns out to be a bit of a softy. Bronson's behavior surprised more than once, although I don't think she reamed-out her son anywhere near enough for his wandering off. That kind of behavior can get a kid killed even on Earth let alone on an alien planet with deadly indigenous life.
I loved the way the tension slowly built and festered in this volume, and once again, Jay Faerber's text and Scott Godlewski's artwork, suitably buffed-up by Ron Riley's coloring, created a great atmospheric story. I had a two or three problems, all tied to reading this on the iPad. First of all the entire page was rendered rather smaller than a standard 6.5" x 10" paper comic book. I have a new iPad Air (full size, not mini), and the iPad image on it is 5" x 7.75". Believe it or not, that's a 40% reduction in surface area.
Yes, you can increase the image size readily on the iPad of course, but then you're stuck with reading the top of the page then the bottom, then flipping the page, and so on. It's annoying. The problem is that if you didn't increase the page size, you had a really hard time reading some of the lettering. I can readily read books and watch TV without needing my eyeglasses, but I had to slap them on to read this.
Another annoyance in the iPad is how slow it is to turn the pages. If you're moving through it at a relatively modest pace, the pages swipe by pretty readily, except that sometimes the iPad ignores your tap or swipe and you have to swat the thing multiple times like you're dusting ants off it or something!
I think this problem is exacerbated in dry winter air, so we're left with the ironical behavior of licking our thumb to turn the page - just as we might have done with a paper book! I found that hilarious!, but if you want to skim back a couple of pages, then you're stuck waiting while they load, which is truly annoying when you're going back through the comic reviewing it!
So I think graphic novel and comic book writers and artists need to give some thought to how they approach their craft in this electronic era. Do they want to appeal to the traditional crowd or to the e-crowd? It's worth expending a few gray cells on! This is especially true if you design your comic so that the panels, instead of running down the left-hand page and then down the right, instead run across both pages, one row of frames at a time (see the second sample image on my blog).
because you only see one page at a time on something like an iPad, it's not obvious that this is what the writer and artist have done until you turn tot he next page!
Those quibbles aside, I recommend this volume along with volume one for a complete breakfast of comic! My plan, meanwhile is to head out to the Dragon's Lair this weekend to see if I can find this comic in its original printed form!
