Eric Owen

I'm not a comic book/graphic novel fan... not really. I read them mostly when one of my favorite authors dabbles in the medium, or when their stories are adapted by others, as in this particular instance.

That being said, I liked "Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now", but I did not love it. It contains comic adaptations of six of Cory Doctorow's prose short stories: "Anda's Game"; "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth"; "Craphound"; "Nimby and the D-Hoppers"; "I, Robot"; and "After the Siege". I'd previously read all of these stories, either in Cory's short story collections or online and they are all wonderful examples of Cory's work. And the artwork here is beautiful. But it seems to me that the pacing of these comics is much too fast, you get no sense of the passage of time, and they are extremely over-condensed, the scenes are more like bullet points in an outline, there is no time for the story to breathe, and most of the setting, tone and flavor of the story are missing.

My opinion, "After the Siege" is the best adapted story in this collection. The story of a girl who fights to save her family in a war-torn, zombie-ridden, alternate-universe Russia, where the only man who can help her is the "Wizard", an outsider, a traitor, whose "magic" comes from 3D printers.… (meer)