Last year's Ws, X, and Z reviews!
Sidney Malik is an almost completely trained wizard and a performing magcian who loves his craft with one small exception, he has a curse of sorts which has him accidentally steal items left and right and has caused him more harm than good. So of course when his magic causes him to accidentally steal the wristband of the thief king he's none too happy about it but magical hunter Harriet Barber thinks that she can use his wristband to find the legendary treasure of the thief kings and Sidney insists that since it's his bracelet that he's coming along as well.
The story is actually focusing on some different characters at the moment who appeared in the background of chapter one but so far they've been rather interesting as well and it's always encouraging that an author can write multiple groups of interesting characters without having them appear to simply be expies of each other. Both stories so far have had interesting magic in them, well paced plot lines, and great background art so far so no matter who the story follows next I'll be sure to follow.
Starting in the summer of 1977, young Jonas and his dad are about to spend six weeks at his grandmother's house, although he doesn't plan on spending it working on school work the entire time like his father expects him to do. Instead Jonas plans on having adventures in the woods behind his grandmother's house and in a secret attic he discovered a few years ago which has become a bit more magical since his last visit.
Something that caught me off guard when I re-skimmed the comic is that Jonas is supposed to be a rising 9th grader, 14 is still a pretty young age but even I wasn't still playing with forts and such at 14 and I know none of my classmates were, I thought that Jonas was closer to 11 or 12. Part of the reason I thought that was because the comic seemed to be aimed at 11 or 12 year olds (and you generally age the characters close the age range you're aiming at for readers) because the portrayal of the adult characters is really childish. You usually find more simplified adult characters in MG or younger writing, my views on this could fill up an entire post on their own, and here Jonas dad and grandmother come off as flat, two dimensional characters and, since the main conflict so far is between Jonas and his dad, it makes the whole conflict really hard to take seriously. I like how this comic is laid out visually so far, much like The Pale each chapter is one long image (this time it's a vertical image however) and perhaps the upcoming third chapter will change my view on it but honestly I don't expect to follow this story to the end.
This comic is also avaliable in German, Spanish, French, Brazilian (I guess they mean Portuguese?), Russian, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Bulgarian, Dutch, Italian, Croatian, Bosnian, Czech, and Korean.
