![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: Cloud Hotel
Author: Julian Hanshaw
Published: Top Shelf Productions, 2018
Rating: 1.5 of 5
Page Count: 175
Total Page Count: 528,340
Text Number: 1934
Read Because: browsing graphic novels shelf at..., hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: When he disappears in the woods, a boy ends up at a strange hotel that he can reenter at will—as long as he refuses to answer the lobby's ringing phone. Weird premise, right? And the tone sometimes sells it: the protagonist escaping into the surreal, refusing to step fully into either realm, has a particular melancholy-but-intriguing vibe.
Unfortunately, that's the best of it. The mundane plot he endeavors to escape is conventional, the speculative half is set-piecey without real depth, and the art is bad, with incoherent movement between panels and awful stylization: children look like middle-aged men, adults look like bobbleheads, and blocky shadows around the eye render every character interchangeable. I love a weird graphic novel, but this manages to be weird in a tedious way.
Author: Julian Hanshaw
Published: Top Shelf Productions, 2018
Rating: 1.5 of 5
Page Count: 175
Total Page Count: 528,340
Text Number: 1934
Read Because: browsing graphic novels shelf at..., hardback borrowed from the Timberland Regional Library
Review: When he disappears in the woods, a boy ends up at a strange hotel that he can reenter at will—as long as he refuses to answer the lobby's ringing phone. Weird premise, right? And the tone sometimes sells it: the protagonist escaping into the surreal, refusing to step fully into either realm, has a particular melancholy-but-intriguing vibe.
Unfortunately, that's the best of it. The mundane plot he endeavors to escape is conventional, the speculative half is set-piecey without real depth, and the art is bad, with incoherent movement between panels and awful stylization: children look like middle-aged men, adults look like bobbleheads, and blocky shadows around the eye render every character interchangeable. I love a weird graphic novel, but this manages to be weird in a tedious way.
