“If you’re looking for a book that’s the most Bechdel-passing book of all time, this is it. I don’t think there are ANY male characters depicted or mentioned in the book. Which I didn’t even notice until a pretty wedged-in stump speech about pronouns, which was probably unneeded and broke the spell for a minute.
It wasn’t a big deal in the moment, but after finishing I realized that it was during this speech that I figured out that the book didn’t have any dudes in it. It was cruising along just fine, was very empowering without calling attention to itself for being empowering, and then there was this speech that sort of broke the reality for me a little. See, it’s like, we’re in a different world/universe, everything’s good, but then this part felt like our world invading this world. It’s the only time this happens, really, and it just didn’t fit.
There are things about the art I really dug. The colors were nice, the architecture was cool. But there were times where the art was a little overly abstract, and you couldn’t really follow exactly what was going on. There was also an issue of the characters not having a lot of differentiation. When another character cuts her hair short, I was like, “Damn it! That was my cue for this character!”
A plus/minus thing, most panels only have single dialogue balloons. If you read a lot of comics, this can make for a weird cadence, and you want to see more variation in dialogue placement and quantity. But, if you don’t read a ton of comics, it can be helpful. Also, I understand this was a web comic, so that probably works better for that form.
The whole thing is really creative, and involves space, which is awesome. It’s nice to read something like this now and then.”