Jonathan Minott

Whoa. Be careful what you click on - as in, what you click on when looking at a list of giveaways. (I said to myself "oh, a comic, superhero stuff, might be cool to try".)

This is a bullied kid's revenge fantasy, with super powers. The plot is confusing (who is this and where did this person come from?), the drawings made me cringe, the dialogues were surely taken from a really bad superhero movie. At least it was only 50 something pages, and about 20 minutes of my time.

(Naturally, the above is in no way meant to belittle the suffering of those who get bullied at school.)

I won this book in a StoryGraph giveaway, thanks to the publisher for a free copy.… (meer)

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review!

I decided to give this comic a chance, even though the odd plot description made me raise an eyebrow. Now that I've finished, I really wish I didn't give it a chance. This was a perplexing and at times awful comic to read. The ENTIRE comic has a narrator explaining what is happening in the panels you're reading. Except, why are you telling me via narration instead of just showing me? This is a comic, you don't need a narrator to give you a play-by-play of the exact thing you're looking at for the ENTIRE comic. The plot itself was horrendous and stereotypical and honestly made me roll my eyes. A bullied foster kid encounters alien debris which gives him superpowers, and then he uses those powers to get revenge. But it's not just revenge on his bullies, it's revenge on literally ANYONE he thinks has wronged him or that he thinks is "bad". He comes across some kids trying to steal someone's lunch money, and he kills them brutally. It goes from Disney Channel Movie level to Rated R Deadpool in the blink of an eye. He rips a guy's arms off, melts another guy from the inside out, and turns two dudes into ashes. All of those deaths are just full gore and honestly extremely startling. The tone of this story is all out of whack. His powers aren't explained at all besides "I found an alien egg and it gave me powers!". From what I can tell, it gave him powers roughly on the level of Captain Marvel. There is nothing of him testing out his powers to see how they work, he just immediately starts killing people and destroying stuff. There is also literally NO world-building. A superhero shows up in the last scene to fight Micheal, but who is this hero? Does this mean there are other heroes? Are super hero's a thing in this universe? Did this other guy also get powers from an alien source? Also, why is Erza (the hero guy) referred to as "Earth's Last Hope"? Literally, nothing is answered at all, it feels like the book just expects you to have prior knowledge. The dialogue is also pretty terrible, and the way it fluctuates between word bubbles only having a handful of words and then others having massive multiple paragraphs is honestly a bit infuriating. The dialogue is on the level with the Disney Channel Movie tone, which makes it bizarre to read when the plot tone switches to the Rated R Movie in gory scenes. The art style itself is also pretty bad. It keeps changing style from page to page, sometimes in classic American comic style and sometimes in almost a manga style. Several times, characters clearly were just photos of real people that had either been traced over or had a "Comic Filter" slapped over them. The sound effects also were oddly jarring and shoved it in a way that ruined the pages. There would be random sound effects (which is normal for an American-style comic) but the font they were in was HUGE and always in some sort of neon color. It distracts you from reading the page, cause half of a panel just says "CRACK" in huge letters and is neon yellow. I have never said this before about a book or comic, but reading this was a massive waste of time.

Also, this was formatted horribly. The Kindle version puts two pages onto one page and makes them tiny and impossible to read. The NG App version is slightly better, but it still made the page super small. My poor eyes.… (meer)