Saturday, October 29, 2011

Comic Review: My Boyfriend is a Monster 1: I love him to pieces

Sorry for the delay posting this, school and sewing projects just piled on me yesterday and I had no time to sit down and write this. Actually, going to get a post up either later tonight or tomorrow about that, I'm having to change my schedule up again in November, partially for NaNo and partially because I'm afraid that I'm still going to have crazy amounts of homework to deal with.

As for the book, I found it at the local library, looked like a cute zom-rom-com (I do believe that's an actual genre too) and read through the whole thing in about one half hour sitting. It might be part of a series, since I've found a number of similarily titled books on Amazon (all made by different people however) but I read it as a standalone and it worked just fine like that.

My Boyfriend Is a Monster 1: I Love Him to Pieces by Evanne Tsang, Illustrated by Janing Görrissen
Summary: Dicey may be the star of the baseball team while Jack is on track to be the school valedictorian but they get along surprising well when they have to work together on a health project. Well enough that they start getting interested in each other, too bad their first date is the day the zombie apocalypse breaks out in town.

The Good: I like stories that purposefully subvert the jock and nerd stereotypes since honestly those tropes never seemed that true to me and it's just hard to take a story that builds it's characters off of them seriously. So it was fun to see Dicey and Jack get along the way that regular classmates would and then grow more interested in each other as the story went along. They also held their own pretty well in the zombie apocalypse and it was a cute, quick story in that respect.

The Bad: There were some illogical moments in the story though, why didn't Jack/his parents want him to get evacuated and instead wait in the town for the government officials to come? Clearly it was so the story would get to the "my boyfriend is a monster" part but that part felt dumb to me and, since it was the reason a lot of other things happened, I felt like it weakened the story overall.

The Art: The art actually looks a lot like what I would find in a webcomic, there's a bit of manga/anime influence to the characters but it's clear that the artist isn't trying to imitate that style and there is a lot of Western influences in the art as well. I really liked the art style, it was the cute but not too cute style I like, lots of nicely inked details and backgrounds and actually didn't clash with the story despite it's slightly cutesy appearance.

It's not a super special story or one that does anything different but it was cute and mostly worked so I enjoyed it. It's odd to call a zom-rom-com fluff reading but that's what it was for me, a little fun thing to read when I needed something to do and enjoyed doing it as well.