WardenRed reviewed Blackwater by Jeannette Arroyo
None
3 stars
Maybe don't just go out into the woods alone with some dead guy! Safety, y'know? Self-preservation?
Yet another one of those situations when I appreciate what the author was trying to do, but not the execution. It was incredibly hard to get into this graphic novel. The pacing was just so uneven, with events happening randomly with little build-up, and the characters never got properly introduced. It was like starting a tv show in the middle of a season. I feel like the story found its footing way in the second half, and the plot actually started getting interesting instead of vaguely promising, but it was kind of too late. I would suspect this had something to do with the fact the book started out as a webcomic, except I've read plenty of webcomics with stronger beginnings, better character arcs, and evenly spread out action, so this isn't a …
Maybe don't just go out into the woods alone with some dead guy! Safety, y'know? Self-preservation?
Yet another one of those situations when I appreciate what the author was trying to do, but not the execution. It was incredibly hard to get into this graphic novel. The pacing was just so uneven, with events happening randomly with little build-up, and the characters never got properly introduced. It was like starting a tv show in the middle of a season. I feel like the story found its footing way in the second half, and the plot actually started getting interesting instead of vaguely promising, but it was kind of too late. I would suspect this had something to do with the fact the book started out as a webcomic, except I've read plenty of webcomics with stronger beginnings, better character arcs, and evenly spread out action, so this isn't a genre/format problem.
I would have been more lenient toward the weird plot/pacing issues if I liked any of the characters, but there was precisely one of them whose presence on the page I enjoyed, and even she was... well, I hardly got to know her. I hardly got to know anyone, to be honest, despite this being a pretty big book for a comic. In some cases, this was slightly remidied in the second half when the author added some backstory here and there. But in most cases, the focus kind of constantly was more on the situations the characters were in than the characters themselves, even in the parts that begged to be more character-driven. Maybe that's why it felt like the relationships didn't evolve organically; I have very little idea what drew the main characters together in the first place, and the way Tony's relationship with his father suddenly switch to a completely different pattern was baffling.
I did appreciate the trans rep and the chronical illness rep, and the artwork is lovely. There's a lot of cool stuff here in terms of wolrdbuilding, too, especially with the ghosts. I loved how the ghost-seeing ability was handled.
