Skip to main content

Click "Archive" or "Labels" in the sidebar to browse reviews, or use the search bar to look for a specific title.


Review: Oddly Normal, Book 1

Oddly Normal, Book 1 Oddly Normal, Book 1 by Otis Frampton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thanks to Diamond Book Publishers for sending me a copy!

I really didn’t know what to expect from this graphic novel, but Oddly Normal was oddly great! I’d say the first issue was the worst, with Oddly (the main character's name) being all mopey. I never really got why she hated her parents so much. It also just seemed too rushed. After that this volume gets progressively better, which was fun. By the end I did get this huge Harry Potter vibe from it, so take that as you will. (view spoiler)

Besides the kind of weird anatomy, the art was pretty awesome I thought. It was very colourful, and I always appreciate a comic with some good colours. It really looked like it could be screenshots from an animated cartoon or something, that was how the style was. After reading the author bio at the end I realized that the author, Otis Frampton, is one of the animators on the youtube animated series How It Should Have Ended ! So that was exciting.

I am interested in continuing with reading the volumes, but I’m terrible with series so it might not happen anytime soon.

View all my reviews

Comments

Popular Posts

Review: 寄宿学校のジュリエット(3)

寄宿学校のジュリエット(3) by 金田陽介 My rating: 5 of 5 stars Brb, crying. Not actually, though. Like, I didn’t shed any actual tears or even get close to it, it’s just that this series… is so good . The romance between Romeo and Juliet is still weirdly innocent, but the actual story is so engrossing and entertaining. It also seems like almost literally every single character is complex and interesting and multi-layered. (Only the background characters like Maru’s lackeys are undeveloped, but honestly they really don’t need any development anyway.) The relationships between characters keep getting more and more complex, and the situations that the characters have to deal with are also super juicy. This is such an addicting series. My initial problem with Romeo and Juliet’s relationship was that it seemed pretty unhealthy and one-sided to me. Later, I found it very weird how sexually immature they both are, and how un-intimate their relationship is. What is interest...

Review: Lulu Is a Rhinoceros

Lulu Is a Rhinoceros by Jason Flom My rating: 3 of 5 stars The second I saw the cover of this book and read the synopsis I immediately thought that this was going to be a book that uses animals to create an allegory about transsexuality, as another installment in the growing genre of kid’s LGBTQA+ books. The whole "that's what she sees when she looks in the mirror" business felt really on the nose, and I feel like the authors purposefully used this wording in order to generate buzz around this book. In actuality, this felt like any other normal kids book. You have a character who feels misunderstood by their peers, and so they go on a "journey" to find and/or prove themselves and eventually end up finding peace with who they are and/or a group who accepts them. To me, the story was told in a way that presented Lulu like any other silly character in a children's book that had a silly problem stemming from their silly misco...

Review: モブサイコ100 2

モブサイコ100 2 by ONE My rating: 4 of 5 stars [Source] The end of the first volume very briefly introduced the best character Teruki Hanazawa, and the entirety of this second volume is comprised of the conflict that arises between him, Mob, the punks, and the Body Improvement Club. These episodes were super hype in the anime, and it’s just as hype here in its original manga form. ONE is absolutely fantastic at drawing fights and portraying movement to the point where he puts lots of trained and seasoned manga artists to shame. The art is actually really good: The hatching, the backgrounds, the use of perspective, the layout of the panels, the movement, the emotion, the faces, everything is actually SO well done. ONE’s art style just has this shitty kind of sheen that obscures all of that which is what gives the impression that the art isn’t good (when it actually is). The only complaint I have is that it felt like the, ahem, “power struggle” (I’m tryin...