“I knocked off a star because goddamn it, this book does the thing. The thing where we’ve got journal pages and stuff like that, but they’re written in a way that they’re hard to read, physically. Notably, there’s a page a person is holding, and her finger covers the center of the page. You can read around it and get the gist, but why? Why do it like this? Why not have the page flat on a table, her hand on top as she leans on the table, and her fingers could hold the page down by the margin? This isn’t even a matter of realism–who holds a single sheet of paper with an index finger covering the center of the page?
Imagine you’re making scissors with your index and middle finger, and then you use those finger scissors as clamps to pick up a sheet of paper. That’s how this operates, and I won’t condone it, damn it.
This is my number one pet peeve right now in comics, and it’s my number one example of something that’s fun to do, to write and draw, but sucks to read.
ALSO: when you’re doing a huge block of text like this, it’s almost always an exposition dump, which is no good. “