Oh, the opinions expressed in the reviews themselves are often dead wrong on account of being dalek's, but I love the completely unapologetic tone of the whole thing. It's clearly one man's opinion and no ****s were given about rocking the boat or going against the popular opinions of about any given story, and that makes the whole thing a far more engaging read than any attempt at a "neutral" review could ever hope to be.
But as a non-Brit, the most interesting part of the whole endeavour was actually the bits that weren't about the stories. I've read all of this stuff by now either in collected form or as scans, so there weren't any huge surprises to me there. But the tidbits of info about early creators like Steve Parkhouse and Mike Collins were really interesting, as I really wasn't all that aware about how much (or little) some of these men had contributed over the years. And the wealth of information about letters pages, backup strips, features and articles was the real goldmine to me. Most of this is stuff I never knew existed, let alone seen, and it really places the stories in a different context to me. I'd also never really thought through the implications of delivering 11 pages of story weekly rather than 22 pages monthly, and the commentary on how well (or poorly) this worked both in the native UK strips and the chopped-up US ones was a real standout.
I did have some niggles, though.
This was probably the biggest one. It really made it difficult to follow the reviews in which it happened.Cliffjumper wrote:Nicely presented too, found the format really good and the typos unobtrusive, though there's a spell about 80% in where a few columns reverse order that is quite disorientating.
The other thing that didn't really work for me was the addendums. The content itself was fine, but the way they were presented in the book was really distracting. Having them run on the right hand pages while the main reviews continued on the left really made it tough to keep track of where I was, and flipping three pages forward to read an addendum only to have to flip back and find where I'd left off was quite frustrating (especially since -- as my son will chew on any books I try to read at home -- I did most of my reading in half-hour chunks on the bus and often had to leave off in the middle of something). If Volume 2 found another way to present these, I think it'd be a big improvement.
P.S.: If I live to be a hundred I'll never understand the love you Brits have for Geoff Senior. He's fine and all, but I enjoy the work of a lot of other Marvel TF artists more than his.