Ro SolarianBesprekingen

I used to read this online! Wow, maybe time for a revisit.

* I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this book. *

Anna and Kat are sisters working with a seedy and run-down circus. Anna is a fortune teller and Kat a knife-thrower. The circus gets stranded in the desert after a breakdown. After a few days in unrelenting heat, Anna finds Kat dead, stabbed in the back with her own knives. Soon after, she sees Kat's ghost and is possessed by it.

Circus owner Jebediah Tetanus asks Anna to keep the murder quiet and to investigate on her own. She does so, with the aid of her sister's ghost and of her own hand-built computer. Snake charmer Flora also insists on getting involved.

There is a lot going on in this story, and the climax of volume 1 hints at even weirder things to come. I found it very engaging, and Gedris' lurid artwork is very appropriate for the circus setting. This is a strong start to what promises to be a very interesting series.

Five women against one dude who wants to rule the world. Easy bet.

A nice ending to a fine series about members of a circus coming up against the supernatural in the American Old West.

I liked the premise a lot for this story: circus performer has to solve a murder that takes place when they’re stranded on the railroad tracks on the way to their next performance. Having the ghost of the murder victim help her solve the mystery made it even more interesting.
I was hoping for more resolution in this first volume, but I’ll stay on board for more. Anna is an interesting enough heroine, and I like Flora as her sidekick. My favorite panel of the book was Flora pulling a list of suspects from the depths of her considerable cleavage.

Nice follow up to the first, with one important reveal and the introduction of a new secret regarding Anna and Kat’s childhood. The mutation storyline is pretty weird, but I’m enjoying Anna’s development as a character and her interactions with Kat and Flora.

This would probably be a better series at half the length, but despite the tendency to meander about -- like the digression with a faith healing con artist this time around -- I'm happy to have made far enough to see the murderer confirmed and a final confrontation set up for the conclusion next volume.

After a sophomore slump, the series is back on track as the twin sisters -- one alive and one a ghost -- make the tiniest bit of progress in solving the dead sister's murder and finally let loose some secrets they've been holding from others and each other.

I have the next volume on hand from the library, so I'll get to see tomorrow if the mystery is at last solved or dragged out for another installment.

I DNFed after the early ableism about the "freaks." Let that be your content warning.

Pretty unlikable main character, which is always hard for me to deal with as a reader, but the circus setting is great -- and I'm torn about this -- I kind of like that she isn't a friendly happy person, and that her response to other people is fairly hostile most of the time -- it makes a good foil for the extra friendly dead sister -- but there isn't a secret well of things that do make her happy, so she's just comes across as a miserable and stuck person.

The storytelling feels weirdly mechanical to me -- ack, a murder mystery. Did this person do it? They must have. But they couldn't have. How about this person? They must have. But they couldn't have. Hmm. I will sleep now, or consult my difference engine. Repeat.

The art is quite compelling, so that also pulls the plot along, and a after a while it does pick up. On the whole, I think it's well done but not quite my cup of tea. I also was extremely surprised by the sudden ending in the ARC -- very abrupt, and no back matter to indicate that it is indeed the ending.

Advanced Reader's Copy provided by Oni Press.

The second volume of Megan Rose Gedris’ SPECTACLE doesn’t really do much to move the story along; if nothing else, there are more layers added to a secondary mystery that has no resolution come the end of this volume, let alone finding out anymore about who murdered Anna’s sister, Kat. So, there’s the continued murder mystery, a mystery concerning a demon who has something to do with Kat, a mystery concerning the circus possibly being cursed, and a mystery about when the twins were young girls and something to do with their grandmother. Lots and lots and lots of mysteries. And little to no movement of the story along this volume. My library doesn’t have the next volume, but I discovered the series is serialized on Gedris’ website, so I’ll pick it up there. I’m invested enough now to know what’s going on, I just wish it was moving a bit faster.

Anna and Kat are twin sisters working in the Samson Brothers Circus, Anna as a psychic and Kat as a knife thrower. However, when Kat is found murdered, Anna is put on the job of finding her murderer and it turns out there may be more to Anna’s “psychic” powers than anyone first thought. A fun start to the SPECTACLE graphic novel series by Megan Rose Gedris from Oni Press, there’s a little bit of murder, mystery, romance, supernatural shenanigans, and ghosts.

Spectacle is Gedris' first YA comic, but it retains a lot of the things I've always loved about her adult work. As a performer, she brings the vibrant colors, movement, and costuming of her other job to her comics. Set in a traveling (train) circus in the Old West, Spectacle is populated with talented performers, mysterious characters, and an array of disabled people who are not other-ized in the circus as they are in the general populace.
The plot kicks off with the murder of Anna's twin sister, Kat. Anna wakes up, finds her sister's body in a pool of blood, and starts to see her ghost. The story progresses from there as we meet more people in and out of the circus and Anna tries to figure out whodunit. Much of the internal conflict is based on Anna's rocky relationship with her sister and on the ways in which talking to ghosts challenges her previously held beliefs in science over the unexplainable.
The story touches on the ways people engage with religion and with each other, with the concepts of blood family and found family, and the ways we judge those around us. It's a really fun time, tempered with tragedy and mystery.

The second fantasy series this week where I'm disappointed by a second volume that goes nowhere after a promising first volume. (See also: Norroway by Cat and Kit Seaton.)

The likable enough introverted main character ambles and rambles around the circus and freak show not solving the murder mystery that has linked her to her sister's ghost. We spend more time with the other members of the show, but really don't get to know them beyond the mysterious mutations that have started to plague them all. No one seems particularly concerned about that development, which signals to me that I shouldn't be either.

I see that two more volumes are being released this year, and I have to wonder if the mystery will ever be solved and if I care enough to invest more time. Hmmm.

This was interesting. I was intrigued by the world-building and the story, but I honestly wasn't as invested in the characters as I could have been. Maybe it was that there wasn't enough space in the pages for me to really get to know the characters. But I really appreciated the diverse cast, and would have loved to really gotten to know them more. The writing is also smart and at times funny. Though, I did not appreciate that the ending is a massive cliffhanger and ended abruptly - at first, I thought some pages got cut off in my review copy. I think there's a lot of promise here.

Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley.

The quirky appeal of the art and writing just outweigh the clumsiness and awkwardness of the same. A murder in the American Old West (one that is not solved in this volume, by the way) forces a smart, introverted, amateur steampunk computer programmer whose day job is fortune teller in a circus to become an investigator, looking for the murderer amongst her coworkers in the main ring, the side shows and the freak show (which while handled fairly well here, is still problematic ground to tread). A skeptic, she is also forced to cope with new, in-her-face evidence of supernatural forces at work.

I'd like to see how things develop in a second volume.

I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Just stand here for ten minutes to say I did, and then I can go read my book.

This story is about twin sisters who work in a circus together, and there's so much to unpack. One of the twins, Anna, pretends to read fortunes but it's all a lie - she doesn't really believe in anything supernatural, and in fact, she prefers logic, and a statistics machine that she built herself. Then her twin is murdered, and suddenly she can see ghosts, including her own twin's ghost.

Volume One is clearly a beginning of the story, but it was enough to get me intrigued. There are many open questions, such as what Kat is hiding, or what happened to the two girls before they ended up at the circus. I loved the relationship between Anna and Kat, and I also loved the way the other ghosts helped Anna.

The art was unique, and this was a pretty funny, magical read with circus-y events and supernatural happenings.

Also, I'm pretty sure Kat is queer, which... on one hand, she's dead, but on the other hand, she's a pretty major character and also a ghost, so she's not really gone? I'm curious to see what happens next.

Lively, painterly art. So so story. I’m getting the next volume. The freaks in the circus take back control.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley

★★★½⭐

"I was born at a sunrise, thirty years ago. My sister made her entrance to the world at dusk. The trend continued throughout our lives."

Kat and Anna are twin sisters but couldn't be more different. Kat is a social butterfly and a knife thrower and Anna is Madame Strange - not good with pepole unless giving them false propercies. One night Kat gets murdered and Anna has to deal with the loss, find out who killed her sister, and figure out what's going on with Kat's ghost.

Considering that it's a story about the death of the sister I thought the tone is going to be more serious but it was a really funny read. Kat's a hilarious ghost and I laughed a lot while reading this book so I'm glad it kept the melancholy at bay.

I liked the interactions between Kat and Anna. It's nice to read something about a bond between siblings for once and I haven't read that in a while.

At the beginning I didn't really like the art (especially how the faces are drawn) but I got used to it and I have to admit that it suits the atmosphere of a circus. Also, the colours used looked interesting.

The comic ended in a strange place? I'm not sure whether I haven't received the full thing (I've only got 115 pages) but it seemed cut too suddenly.

All in all, I would like to read more of that.

Liked it a lot! Megan's colors always delight me. The story is interesting, the art dynamic and expressive. Looking forward to the next volume!

Absolutely adored this. Glorious gluttonous smut. Delightfully sexy trip.

Engaging premise and setting, but a deeply unsatisfying ending.

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley. Trigger warning for ableist language directed at the circus "freaks".)

Twin sisters Anna and Kat are performers in the Samson Brothers Circus: Anna tells fortunes, while Kat is a knife-thrower. Whereas Kat's talents are all too real, Anna is a fraud. Well, kind of: while Anna tells the rubes what they want to hear, she can predict the future and decipher the past with the help of her self-made conjecture engine. It's kind of slow and not very flashy, so - like Anna - it mostly stays in the background.

When the circus's train is stalled out in the middle of the desert, Kat turns up dead, stabbed in the back with her own knives. Not wanting to alarm the other performs, circus owner Jebediah Tetanus (how's that for an evocative name?) tasks Anna with solving the murder in secret. But things go from bad to worse when a series of tragedies beset the circus, including Tetanus's own arrest at the hands of the corrupt deputy sheriff. Not to mention Kat's lingering spirit, which flits in and out of Anna's body to hide from pursuing demons.

So I really wanted to love Spectacle - and some of the elements here are great - but there's a lot going on. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, except that very little is resolved by the end of chapter five. Usually I expect that a TPB has a self-contained story arc, but Book One of Spectacle feels more like the first two-thirds of a story. The ending - in which one of the roustabouts suddenly sprouts a rhino horn - is deeply unsatisfying, to say the least.

The art wasn't initially my favorite - so many blockheads! - but it grew on me pretty quickly. I enjoyed the setting, which is some time in the mid (?) 1800s (?). This makes for some great old timey humor, such as when the circus doc diagnoses Anna with hysteria and prescribes coffee. With a side of heroin.

The story features a cast of pretty fascinating women characters, from Flora the would-be fat lady/current snake charmer to Lucy Chen, a clown who did it all for love. I really hope that my suspicions about the source of the weirdness between Anna and the bearded lady pan out; a cute F/F romance makes every story better, okay. I wish that we'd seen more of Eve and Lynn, the conjoined twins; there's a lot of ableist yet era-appropriate language thrown their way, and I want desperately for the story challenges this as the plot unfolds. The collision between science and the supernatural also holds some promise going forward.

P.S. WHAT GIVES WITH THE PICKLES!?!

http://www.easyvegan.info/2018/05/22/spectacle-vol-1-by-megan-rose-gedris/