Brody’s Ghost Collected Edition by Mark Crilley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I bought Brody’s Ghost after finding out about it on Mark Crilley’s youTube channel.
Mark Crilley’s youTube channel has literally hundreds of videos helping people increase their art knowledge and skills. I bought Brody’s Ghost to get a better idea of how to layout a graphic novel. But I wouldn’t have done that if the story didn’t seem interesting.
In fact the story was extremely well told. I finished the collected edition in under 24 hours. It had fun, sometimes funny, thoughtful characters that I really enjoyed reading about. I found myself wanting to read on even when I had more pressing things to be focused on – the sign of a good story.
The storytelling in terms of scene structure and overall story arc was also fairly great. The art style really lent itself to a fast-paced story.
I only had two small issues:
1. Brody’s character arc wasn’t super strong and
[Spoiler]
2. Talia’s power to possess Brody to get him out of 2 really bad situations was introduced very late in the story and because it wasn’t referenced or foreshadowed earlier made it feel extremely “convenient.” To be fair, how it “worked” in the climax was a great idea though. I just wished it had been foreshadowed or mentioned earlier in the story so it didn’t come out of nowhere and give off that “how convenient” feeling.
[/Spoiler]
Final thoughts: Highly recommended. Very interesting story and well told. Building tension was good and it led to a super exciting climax that I had to try hard to restrain myself from turning the pages too fast so that I could appreciate the artwork better.
Slattstudio 