Review Copy Reviews

Here's another book that was sent to me to review from AIT/Planet Lar. Thanks again, Larry!

Bad Mojo: This book is really very good except for one major, huge, enormous flaw. More on that in a bit. Larry sent it to me with a nice note in which he worried I might not like this because it's a bit creepy. Actually, the creepiness worked well and was not overdone in this one. It wasn't a very scary story at all, and from that angle I enjoyed it a lot.

And let me mention here that I really wanted to order this when I saw it in Previews, but couldn't swing it with that month's budget. I was delighted to have it sent to me to review. Admittedly, I would have preferred more baseball in the story, since it's about a baseball player, but that wasn't the focus of the tale and I can accept it. The art is very nice, reminds me of Eric Shanower's work. The horror bits are nicely creepy without excessive gore.

In fact, this book rates at least four starfish all the way through... except for one major problem. There is no end. The book doesn't resolve at all. If this were solicited as part of a mini-series or on-going, I could accept the lack of ending, but for a book that should be a standalone, it is too irritating. But for that, this is a very strong book. I will recommend it, but mildly, with the warning that there is no ending. Because it really is quite a good book.

As an almost unrelated aside: I'm still waiting for someone to do an excellent baseball comic book that doesn't involve baseball stars turning into superheroes (like in the awful Mariners comic book in which the stadium had a secret base underneath it and the stars of the team had to battle evil sasquatch *shudder*). I think the comic book form would be an excellent one to explore sports in, if only there were a writer/artist team willing to tackle it. I have ideas, but I don't have the writing skill to turn them into plots, and my artwork is... rudimentary. I know first-graders who draw more convincingly than I do.