4 out of 5

This book is gorgeous.  It’s not often nowadays that a book can continually visually grab my eye; there are artists whom I adore, but even in the majority of their projects, I’ll stop and admire the intended splashpage or whatnot, or perhaps some specific minutiae I appreciate, but I’m inured to the initial Wow effect after enough exposure.  This is my fifth Jason Brubaker book, and I must’ve stopped to admire the artistry – the layouts, the lettering decisions, the coloring, the animation – on nigh every page.  The previous 2 Sithrah volumes were impressive, but this volume has the boost of more characters, more settings, and more contraptions to play around with, giving the book an intense amount of visual flair.

Storywise, Jason is still piecing things together, and this book is slightly more of a runaround than the impressive volume 2.  Gonna and Dino find temporary solace with some surface dwellers; we learn bit more about Sithrah.  Gonna – while admittedly acting her age – feels a bit more precocious here, which results in some story buffer moments, but we do see and understand more about the world of Sithrah as a result.  The flip of this, though – accounting for the runaround feeling – is that it’s almost too much info at once.  Brubaker drops a lot of new concepts, to the point that it starts to feel a bit silly.  But: we’re on our way to the next stage of the adventure before that criticism takes full root, floated along by the fantastic art…