Star Scouts
By Mike Lawrence
Published by First Second
Star Scouts a sci-fi adventure staring Avani, a tomboy who is filled to the brim with hate since she had to move to a new town and her new scout troop is pure cliche girl. But one day she is abducted by aliens and finds that there is an alien scout troop who are way more interesting. Here, she thrives, makes new friends, and learns interesting things. Unfortunately her new scout troop has rivals, and she must work to become the best star scout ever.
I did not like this book. My main problem is that the writing is too immature. It tries very little to be creative, and relies way too much on cliche and immature humor. While there is the occasional joke that I chuckled at, the vast majority of them fall flat. The art is nothing new, with a generic sci-fi aesthetic I've seen before. The character designs are a more mixed bag. Some are good, some are bad. The human designs are the worst offenders. The faces look more alien than the aliens. Another problem was layout and flow. Some of the panels were hard to read since they were poorly laid out, causing me to loose track of where I was. Over all it was pretty poor. The occasional witty joke and the little details in the backgrounds are what saves it from a very low score.
TLDR: 4/10
The Creeps
By Fran Krause
Published by 10 Speed Press
It's the spookiest month of the year, so what better then a book about fear. The Creeps is a series of short vignettes about fear, and includes the supernatural, the classic phobias, and more then a few urban legends. Breaking up the one page fears are a few longer stories about more specific events, that are more abstract in their creepiness.
I quite enjoyed this book. The Art was simple, but I love watercolor illustrations. I understand many of the fears presented in the book, and I do share a few of them. I do wish that there was more of the longer form vignettes principled throughout. I thought that they were the best part of the book, and wish there were more.
TLDR: 7/10
Mighty Jack and the Goblin King
By Ben Hatke
Published by First Second
This is a sequel. The review for the first book can be found here. This book picks up right where the last one ended, with our two main characters having followed the beast that took Jack's sister through a magic portal. There, they find themselves in a world which was once used as a bridge between dimensions, but now is overrun by giants who intend to keep it sealed off from the rest of the universe. Under the castle lives a community of goblins, who used to rule the dimension before the giants ruined everything, and they want revenge. Our heroes must find away to defeat the giants before Jack's sister is sacrificed by the giants to insure their continued reign,
This book suffers from some of the strengths and problems the first book suffered from. The characters are all likable and have good chemistry. The art is good, with a good mix of medieval and more industrial. I like the goblins and their society, and would have loved for there to have been more there then their was. The problem is there isn't enough. I would have loved more of the goblins, a grander world to explore, a more interesting villain with an actual motivation besides raw power over something pretty insignificant. It does put it's pieces together well, but I would have liked more, and I'm excited to see where Hatke goes with these stories.
7/10
Wires and Nerve
By Marissa Meyer
Published By Feiwel and Friends
I'm going to start this review with a disclaimer. I have not read the Lunar Chronicles series, and thus have had to start with this book. Now, on with the review. Wires and Nerve stars a menagerie of characters, but mainly stars Iko, an sentient android from the moon, tasked with hunting down the remnants of an army of mutant wolf-men; a leftover from the Earth-Moon wars. During her struggle, she finds these ex-soldiers have reorganized, and have been committing atrocities all over earth, in a bid for revenge. While this is happening, political struggles on the moon are boiling over, and may threaten Iko's friends.
I was confused at first, since I was missing context from the previous books, and the book did try to filling some of the gaps, but did a bad job at it. At first I didn't really know any of the characters, and none of them made much of an impact, though some of them did eventually grow on me a bit. The art was okay. Nothing I haven't seen before, but it does the job well enough. The story was interesting, but it didn't really grab me very well. While I was reading it, I was thinking about how the story before the book would be more interesting to read. This book is okay, and that's really it.
T:DR: 6/10
