“Not my bag.
I think the combo of comics and essays doesn’t work so great. I don’t need a comic that makes a point (there are pros and cons to smart cities) followed by an essay that says the same thing.
It’s a new version of something I’ve seen when prose writers delve into comics. A lot of times, the prose writer will use the dialog balloons to write out what’s happening in the panel because they’re used to having to explain it without the aid of images. The comics end up being kind of a slog to read because you’re getting the same information twice instead of letting the prose and pictures create a larger, better whole.
In this book, it’s kind of like the comics do something, then a block of text reinforces the same thing, explains the same concept in a non-fictional way instead of a fictional way. And the concepts are pretty well-explained in the comics, I think, and I think I’d prefer if the book were either: A) without the essays, or B) if the comics were written based on the essays, and therefore we could do each concept once.
Now imagine I did something clever and drew a comic that said the same essential things I just wrote above. “