3 out of 5

A free preview book.  As usual, we’re rating this on the effectiveness of the preview.

The design of the book is rather cheap and garish looking – a faded , tilted grid of four colors that forms the background for the cover and title pages – but it makes me wonder if this is a stab at Vertigo’s CMYK one-shots, sorta’ like shouting that Image (the ‘i’ is for Image subtitle because the company’s logo is the big ol’ letter i) is now the name for creator-owned curios, and it doesn’t need a silly themed gimmick to sell it.  But whatever the reasoning, despite the book feeling / looking cheap (it’s free, I get it, so low quality paper happens), I applaud the very basic setup: a table of contents, then one title page per preview.  No extra blabber.  It’s interesting how the titles are sequenced, also: it’s not alphabetical by title or creator/s; it’s not chronological.  I guess the first four previews are bigger ‘names,’ but that’s debatable.  The only other thing I can think is that they stacked the titles so that the art wouldn’t get overwhelming, staggering blockier artists (Jock, Rossmo) with more detailed ones (Christian Ward, Andrei Bressan).  Either way, I wasn’t turned off by the sequencing, so we’ll check that as a pro, whether intended or not.  However, the thing I continue to not understand about these previews is why you choose pages that don’t intrigue a reader?  I know there needs to be a balance between introduction and succinctness, but guess what – if the pages can’t be chopped to make sense as a snippet, then either use a different title or give us selected pages with a disclaimer that it’s not in order.  Titan does this in their previews and I find it effective.  There are 6 previews in the book and 1 ad (balls); not counting the ad, half of the previews work as snippets (Wytches especially, ODYC looks boring to me but the preview does the job of giving me a proper sampling, and Rasputin looks like a dumb ‘hook’ title, but again, it’s a proper sample) two don’t (Tooth & Claw is coasting on art and quirk, and From Under the Mountains hardly offers anything) and the last one – Birthright – could work as a preview with, unfortunately, some further prompting as to what the title will actually focus on, so it essentially fails as well.

Beep boop.  Half effective, thus 3 out of 5.