YAHGZ: The Craynobi Tales by Art Baltazar is an odd little graphic novel. There are stories within stories (mostly as flashbacks), but there are things that are missing or at least feels like they are missing, making it hard to understand the why of things. And while this looks like the first of a series, there are (as said at the end) characters with history and part of what is missing is that history. We get some of it such as the narrator is talking about a person, but they have not shown up, until all of a sudden, they do and it is a “Hey that is me you’re talking about,” but there are still people and stories not given.
Sometimes illustrations can help sort things out, by not saying anything, but showing there are people or places to be aware of, or that something is important, and/or coming up. But even the art feels as if it is on acid, or you need to be on acid to read it. Or maybe, I was not the audience for it and a kid (at least 8 and up as there are some fantasy situations that can be intense, but not graphic, or inappropriate), is.
My biggest complaint was the names of characters. They were either impossible to pronounce or too similar, or frankly both. The people we are following are two different tribes and they are a more “Dark Ages” but more sophisticated tribe and a more “Native tribal”. I was not looking for Bob and Fred or Mary but how do you pronounce Yahgz? This is from Papercutz and as much as I usually enjoy their works, they tend to be European authors and those do not always translate well to my American ear. I am not saying that Yahgz is bad, I am just saying I did not think it was good.
