I found this book enjoyable. As best as I can remember, it does seem to be compatible with the other novellas about the character backgrounds.
The stories are well told, although I’ve always felt that graphic arts media usually have too fast of a pacing, this one didn’t seem bad.
One issue I had was that the backstory of Amos Burton seemed odd. I believe it is symbolic of his inner mind. But it doesn’t seem to fit with the style of the book overall.
The Earth is destroyed, everyone indoors is dead. Carl and his cat, Princess Donut, have survived through sheer luck. The Borant Corporation forces the survivors into The World Dungeon, a reality program they are running.
In a dungeon full of monsters, NPC and other crawlers, their goal is to survive. They are assigned a mentor, Mordecai, who will help them through the ordeal.
Fighting monsters, including dungeon bosses, and occasionally other crawlers, they gain fame, fortune and viewers, and ultimately a PR agent, Zev. Occasionally they receive a reward box containing magic items that (should) help them in their quest.
The book is very funny in its ridiculous situations and unexpected events. It feels very much like the 70s-style of dungeon crawls.
Backup is a sciece fiction/action story about a cop who is brought back into the wrong body. He needs to figure out what happened and why while people from the responsible company are trying to clean up.
The story addresses a couple of philosophical issues such as identity and the role of AI in society, I can’t say more without spoilers
The author is a French filmmaker, this is his first book in English.
Although the story is interesting and sometimes compelling, the book and the writing has a number of shortcomings.
I felt the writing was uninspired and sometimes redundant. I believe some of this would clean itself up if there were actors portraying the parts. Even the kearning was bad and distracting at times.
The protagonist and his wife are introduced as perfect people in a perfect relationship, this was overdone but I see it’s value in contrasting with later events. It was too much.
The author often uses impersonal nouns instead of pronouns, such as the cop, the assassin, the adult, when a pronoun would be more appropriate. It felt like he was introducing a new character at first, it read awkwardly. He also uses long and uninteresting descriptions that I wanted to skip over.
Character behavior is often unconvincing and characters seem convinced to change their minds too easily. The text tends to tell rather than show and some chapter-ending harbingers just felt bad.
There are setup problems, buildings that are supposed to be super secure allow people to enter with briefcases that can’t be scanned and aren’t inspected, those same buildings have other access points without security later in the book.
The professional assassins spent time mourning the loss of one of their own during a fight.
Despite these issues, I still feel the book was good. It is a good story with a good ending.
This story is a western set on a distant planet, Blanken 9, at Zestrum Doniphon backwater area of the planet with limited access to technology. The story revolves around a range war for water rights, the protagonist, is new in town and gets caught in the middle, he is a cyborg with several enhancements. He also has a reputation.
The story reads as a light western with some oddities thrown in, it has its cowboys and cowborgs, gunfights and love interests. Many of the minor characters have names taken out of old western movies and tv shows, although that is as far as the similarity goes.
The book is a light and enjoyable read.
This story tells how Darth Vader looks into his past. It is a comic book telling his story from his perspective, he’s the good guy in this one.
It’s an amusing story worth a little time to read. It has good pacing for a comic with good art.
This is my second reading of the book, I wanted to focus more on the flow and some style analysis. More later, my notes are missing…
Powered by WordPress
