Benjamin Reiss (2)

This is one of those books where there is good information to be had, but the presentation just wears me down the longer I read it. Reiss has lots of stories to tell, but doesn't exactly tell them well as he skips around his narrative. He doesn't give a lot of background about himself beyond some romantic entanglements before heading off to Japan, so I only got to know him through his actions in Japan, and frankly he's not someone I would care to spend much time with in real life and becomes a hindrance to the interesting aspects of Japanese life and manga creation that I picked up the book to discover.

Some little things:

1) It isn't explicitly mentioned in the book, but I get the impression the author may be using a framing device to tie together two or more separately published works, as there are some abrupt changes in art style and the flow of the story that are distracting and annoying.

2) There is a careless amount of proofreading errors throughout, especially in the second half of the book when I was getting bored and spending more time looking for reasons to dislike the book.

3) The lettering is atrocious. Different letters are different sizes, resulting in some words appearing to be stressed or shouted when no little letters happen to appear in them. It irks me and is needlessly hard to read. It made me think of the word balloons used for Delirium in the Sandman series, and trust me, the author should not be doing anything to invite comparisons between his work and Sandman.

4) And it is not a drawback, but I find myself wondering whether or not the book was translated by the author or a second party who was not credited. The author seems to be French, but is a polyglot who speaks English and some Japanese.… (mer)