I never thought a day would come where I would not be fan-girling over a new Marissa Meyer work. Sadly that day is here. I thought about this a lot last night, and I think the biggest issue I have with this graphic novel, is that the characters we have come to love in the books are so flat in graphic novel form. I just honestly didn’t care what was going to happen throughout and found my mind wandering as I did. And some of the characters, like Winter, were just a total letdown. I have no idea what the illustrator was thinking, but her hair bugged me in every freaking panel. It kept getting more and more puffy. I don’t know if it was supposed to be curly or just a bad Afro.
I think that this book takes place before some of the events in “Stars Above.” We have Cinder ruling Luna. After the events of “Winter” we have Cinder and others (mainly Iko) trying to track down the rogue wolf-hybrid soldiers that Queen Levana and her henchmen were responsible for creating. So the comic has a short intro to the characters, the events that put Cinder on the throne, and then we fast forward to Iko being a wolf-hybrid hunter. Then we jump back to Luna. The back and forth was a bit much for me. I wanted more time in Cinder’s head. Instead the main focus of these graphic novels is going to be Iko. I adore Iko. I mean 100 percent adore. And we do get to see Iko thinking about what it means to be an android and how frail humans are inside. It just seemed off to me somehow. The Iko we know from the books was into Kai, clothes, and being kissed. The Iko we get in this one is a bad ass fighter and killer. This one sets up a love interest that many are going to be rooting for I think. But the whole thing just left me a bit cold.
Other characters don’t fare so well either. We barely get any of Wolf or Scarlett. We do get more cutaways and interaction with Captain Thorne and Cress though. We also get a cool scene which shows that Cress is still the smartest person ever. But, eh. I am just going to reiterate that everyone felt very flat to me. We do finally get to see Thorne’s parents and I think in about five minutes due to Thorne’s actions everything is forgiven between him and his parents?
We get a new big bad in this one. But after Queen Levana I have to say I am not impressed. The big bad’s justifications for doing things was pretty much I am going to stop beating you to death when you give me what you want, oh you can’t? Too bad, going to keep beating you to death. I actually felt a bit bad for Queen Levana in her stand alone book because you get to see how messed up she was due to her family. Though any sympathy for that character gets thrown out the window when you find out what she does.
The writing was okay. I am just going to recommend people not buy this via their Kindle like I did. I have the newest Kindle Fire and as much as I love that thing, I am starting to see that some books or other things I try to read on it are just not a good idea via that method. In order to even read this, I had to turn my Fire sideways. So it felt awkward the whole time. You can still zoom in and zoom out on panels, and good for the instructions that are set up via the Kindle in order for you to practice. However, no one thought or realized maybe, that due to having to turn the Fire sideways, you can’t read the whole panel. So I had lines of text out of line of sight. I ended up getting so annoyed with that I just zoomed totally out of the panel and tried to read very tiny writing. I maybe swore a lot while doing this.
I thought the color scheme was very blah.
Believe me when I say that trying to read very tiny black lettering via a off-blue background was hard after a while. I needed to see some color somewhere.
I was sorry to see that the setting of Earth and Luna don’t come alive at all in this graphic novel. Maybe I could get behind everything in Luna looking cold and blue. But when the action moves to Earth, why can’t that be in color? Or at least pops of color?
The ending leaves things up in the air with possible harm coming to our heroes. I think I will wait before purchasing, and see if this will become available via the library first next time though.
