1 out of 5

Wete you to make the argument that my comic-reading sensibilities are outdated for a new norm – one informed by webcomic-borne brevity and internet ADD focus – well, I’d hear you out.  I’d want a more detailed justification than that statement, but sure, that might be valid: that I’m the problem.  That what I view as incompetence is actually just the direction things have shifted, which my fuddy-duddy brain rejects.

I haven’t read or seen that argument yet, but I’m open to it.

Scales & Scoundrels isn’t a bad comic.  The loose, cartoony style (favored by many Boom! all ages books lately) is pleasing, and the varied colors – art and colors both by artist Galaad – and borderless word balloons (Jeff Powell) give the thing an independent spirit, echoed in the tale’s swirling around a central misfit who bumbles from scrape to scrape.  But man, accepting the potential for what I’ve mentioned above, it is ruinously constructed.  The framing of scenes is atrocious: I have zero sense of space or characters, with people suddenly appearing in panel as a focus when not apparent in any shots before or after, and the camera swooping into different perspectives / angles without appropriate leading, and the choreography is all assumed, not speaking the language of comics so much as just putting the catalysts of an action together and assuming you get the gist…  The writing follows suit: sure, the opening page establishes that we’re likely following a particular trouble-baiting lass, whose search for food or money keeps putting her at odds with the wrong types, but do I know her name?  Or any character’s name?  Am I given a reason to follow her to the next un-transitioned scene, or any reason to connect the cutaway conversations that happen every other page between other heretofore unseen characters?  Does her cryptic splash page dream have any bearing?  Is the fantasy babble about her (poorly choreographed, see above) transformation into some fire being given any context or weight in the story beyond its random appearance?

No, no, no, and no.  To me, this book is trading in a “feeling,” one supposedly imbued by that gleeful art style and a nudge-nudge fantasy setting by a writer who’s likely read some harry potter and then grown up, but that feeling is being attemptedly reproduced without awareness of how to, like, make a comic.

And it’s not bad – like the presumed story or any given snippet of dialogue is of poor quality – but the incompetence of the final product’s construction made me not care literally a page in.