Feature image by Christian Ward
I’m inundated in books. I have stacks everywhere. It takes me months to get through my “to-read” pile. I borrowed my friend’s copy of Ody-C #1 weeks ago and I finally sat down to read it tonight. It’s a gender-bent SF retelling of The Odyssey. There’s a fold-out timeline of the fictional SFF war and the art is trippy and the pages are swirling cosmic goodness that hearken back to the boundless glory of Jack Kirby, but did I enjoy it?
No. And I feel bad about that, too. It’s good on a conceptual level. I like the idea of Fraction deconstructing the notions of gender and playing with the literary canon, and, as mentioned above, the art is beautiful, but I don’t enjoy it.
I felt the same way when I finally got around to reading Ales Kot’s Wild Children which took me a whopping three years to pull from my shelf and read. The book’s concept was amazing when I read about it: a group of students take over a school by putting LSD in the faculty’s coffee…or did they?!? But, again, the final product was greatly underwhelming.
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