An improvement on the first volume with higher stakes and more buy-in than the slow build of the first one. My biggest issue is that the st4ish stars.
An improvement on the first volume with higher stakes and more buy-in than the slow build of the first one. My biggest issue is that the story is so convoluted. I guess no more than The Big Sleep, but still so all-over-the-place. Different time periods are shown on the same page using different colors, but also the text goes from character dialogue, to internal monologue, to flashback dialogue in succession and it gets jumbled. The art is simple but effective. ...more
The "king" of un-put-down-able fiction strikes again. This was so creepy and yucky, but I could not get enough. Holly was a stand-out ch4.25ish stars.
The "king" of un-put-down-able fiction strikes again. This was so creepy and yucky, but I could not get enough. Holly was a stand-out character in The Outsider and I'm glad I got to read another of her stories. The villains were horrifyingly great and I loved the fact that (view spoiler)[there wasn't even any supernatural horror, just good, old-fashioned, twisted sadism (hide spoiler)].
King went all-in on making this a Pandemic novel. Like distractingly so. He mentions masks, vaccines, hand-washing, elbow bumps, etc. a bizarre amount of times. Like it's one thing to create a sense of setting (the Zoom funeral at the beginning was particularly evocative), and another to let the setting overtake the narrative. In his author's note, King acknowledges this and claims it was necessary. I disagree, and don't think it added anything to an already overlong story.
Part of his approach was to make broad generalizations by assigning every character a binary: maskers & vaxxers (noble and wise) vs anti-maskers & anti-vaxxers (trashy and evil) in a way that made it feel inauthentic and cheap—less like a "political novel" and more like basic virtue signaling. So that was a little cringe and heavy-handed, and 50 pages of filler probably could have been cut out, but otherwise, a solid entry in the King canon. I'd pick up another Holly Gibney book in a heartbeat....more
I love a lot of these characters, Nighcrawler and Pixie in particular, but the story was messy, and there were several filler characters th3ish stars.
I love a lot of these characters, Nighcrawler and Pixie in particular, but the story was messy, and there were several filler characters that didn't add anything to the story. The art was good, but not spectacular. I didn't love that Nightcrawler, famously a staunch Catholic, seemed to abandon his faith in favor of his own "Spark" pseudo-religion. Felt very weird and out of character. Overall, more or less inconsequential in the grand scheme of things....more
I’ve never read anything about Supergirl before and don’t otherwise know anything about her, so as far as I’m concerned, this the defin4.25ish stars.
I’ve never read anything about Supergirl before and don’t otherwise know anything about her, so as far as I’m concerned, this the definitive portrayal of the character. So I really like her now! I thought King made her a nuanced and likable protagonist. And Bilquis’s artwork (along with Lopes’s colors) is really great—a perfect fit for the bizarre collection of alien worlds in the story. Biggest issue is that it’s so overwritten. There are walls and walls of philosophical exposition that are usually unnecessary, and the story is overlong anyway, so it was occasionally a chore to get through. But overall, a great standalone story and introduction to Supergirl. I think Tom King is one of the preeminent comics writers currently working....more
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