1 out of 5

And?  Why was I expecting things to change?  No idea.  There’s something about the Norman format – of a serial killer kid drawn in bubble-head manga style – that appeals, and a casual flip-through shows a handful of horror references and what seem like good implementations of humor, but reading it…  Man, actually reading it is another thing entirely.  Volume 2 of Norman gained some ground by working on its characters a bit, and there might be more of that in the series’ future, but this “ongoing” (which, if I’m reading the indicia correctly is really just reprinting volume 3 of the series) backpedals majorly by trying to do a whole time flip-flop plotting thing and, as a result, it never gets going.  Although it’s amusing how the series gives readers zero indication that this is directly following two books of events, even knowing that its hard to decipher what Silas and translator Ivanka Hahnenberger are trying to do here, beyond the broad (broad) strokes of turning Grace (a focus of some madness in the last book) into a Norman-trainee.

I think – beyond the flip-through impressions – what makes the book disappointing in a I-really-want-this-to-be-good way is that it seems like it might actually be good in its original format.  Ivanka translated the previous volumes as well, if I recall, and it was clumsy then, but somehow it’s even worse here.  It’s sort of sad on Titan’s behalf that their editing duo (Lizzie Kaye, Andrew James) couldn’t smooth this out a bit, and weird given that the publisher puts out a lot of foreign titles that read just fine in English.  There’s also the horrid pacing which, again, was rough before but worse now, thanks much to the more ‘intricate’ plotting.  Because the story is so staccato, and because the “jokes” (you can tell they’re supposed to be jokes because of the timing, even if the humor – literally – doesn’t translate) arrive at the end of each page, I really, really suspect this was published in some type of online format prior to collecting.  If you imagine a week or a few days between each page, it oddly works a bit better; reading it as a “seamless” “comic” does not work at all.

But that’s all imaginings.  We have what we have, which is a pleasant-looking but horribly-reading issue.