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A review by otherwyrld
Harlan Ellison's 7 Against Chaos by Harlan Ellison, Paul Chadwick
1.0
Take a giant of Science Fiction like Harlan Ellison, and ask him to write a standalone graphic novel with fan favourite artist of the Concrete stories Paul Chadwick, and what do you get? A story I can only describe as a total clunker.
I really can't understand what went wrong here, but this story has absolutely nothing going for it. The characters are old and tired, barely fleshed out caricatures that elicit no sympathy from me. There was one who got killed in the middle of the story and I couldn't even remember who he was, let alone feel anything for his death. The villain felt like he should have been twirling a moustache, but it's hard to draw a moustache on a giant snake and expect it to work.
The art felt like it came out of the 1970s and not in a good way either.The colouring had none of the subtlety that modern comics have, and the pages layouts at times was painful to look at. The plot showed traces of imagination, but it was dealt with in such a ham-fisted way that any interest was quickly stifled. The world-building was so rushed that it barely registered as such.
I felt that the book might have been better if it had been allowed to breathe, but here a story that needed a lot of space to make it work was crammed into a 200 page single book, and as a result was stifled before it really got going.
I really hate to give anything a 1 star rating, and I can understand why some people liked it, but for me this book is not so much old-fashioned as just old.
I really can't understand what went wrong here, but this story has absolutely nothing going for it. The characters are old and tired, barely fleshed out caricatures that elicit no sympathy from me. There was one who got killed in the middle of the story and I couldn't even remember who he was, let alone feel anything for his death. The villain felt like he should have been twirling a moustache, but it's hard to draw a moustache on a giant snake and expect it to work.
The art felt like it came out of the 1970s and not in a good way either.The colouring had none of the subtlety that modern comics have, and the pages layouts at times was painful to look at. The plot showed traces of imagination, but it was dealt with in such a ham-fisted way that any interest was quickly stifled. The world-building was so rushed that it barely registered as such.
I felt that the book might have been better if it had been allowed to breathe, but here a story that needed a lot of space to make it work was crammed into a 200 page single book, and as a result was stifled before it really got going.
I really hate to give anything a 1 star rating, and I can understand why some people liked it, but for me this book is not so much old-fashioned as just old.