In my reviews of the last few issues, I've had a lot of repeated
problems come up. The story had gone in a direction that I felt
conflicted about - it had gone from streamlined and focusing mostly on a
very small group, to having split into multiple and keeping several
storylines going at once. My concern was, would this manage to resolve
itself in a way that made all of that work, or was all that setup for
something that wasn't going to work? Looking at this, the answer is now
definitely yes, it managed to resolve all those disparate story threads
well, right before the next hiatus starts, while giving it a good place
to pick up when it starts again.
All the
storylines that were pointed towards in the previous issues get resolved
by this. Alana and Hazel are no longer being held captive by the people
who were after Hazel, Marko and Prince Robot IV's story together has
come to an end, and The Will was finally brought back by Gwendolyn and
Sophie. Not only were they resolved, all of them felt like a fitting end
to those storylines; while this may have been a story told over six
months, it all feels like it is resolved without closing the book on
things completely.
Where this series continues
to befuddle me, where I thought that I understood storytelling, is that
it manages to keep pulling off something that is the opposite of most
storytelling advice that I hear: streamline, don't keep making things
bigger. Especially at the end of each story arc, there's this tease of
just making the story so much bigger, of taking things in a different
direction than it was going before. The longer this story goes, the
bigger it keeps getting, but without it feeling like it's growing out of
control.
Overall, this series just continues
to be really good. If you have the chance, start back at the beginning,
and read forward from there; it's hard to jump in somewhere in the
middle of the series, and it's worth it from the beginning.
Even
though I love this series, I'm realizing that trying to review it like
this just is not working, and I'm not going to write more reviews of it
in the future, when it comes back from its couple month hiatus. This
series has been really good for a long time, it's not easy to jump right
into it in the middle, and so this type of review is just not working
for me, since I don't know what anyone would really get out of it.
Instead, I'm going to write about it differently in the future, not so
much reviews, as trying to dig deep into each issue as it comes out.
These articles are going to be full spoilers for everything in it, since
that's really the only way that it makes sense to discuss it: go deep
into what's working and what's not, and see what in the issue is worth
thinking about deeply and really analyzing. It won't come out quite as
quickly as the reviews I normally write, since that will take more time
to write, but it's not about getting something out there as quickly as
possible, but about thinking deeply about the issue and the series as a
whole.
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