When my mother found me reading comic books, she would always say, dismissively, “Don’t strain your brain!” That came back to me ironically about this graphic novel (originally issued as 3 comics)–it is a strain for me to read image-heavy\/text-light books. The creators described this as “Western Manga,” which captures the type of wordless narration. Three pets–a dog, a cat, and a rabbit–have been kidnapped and turned into experimental cyborg soldiers who escape. Very violent and gory, yet studded with some amazing images. I don’t have a lot of passion or time for the genre usually, but love for Franco-Belgian comics (Asterix, Tintin, Lucky Luke) and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics<\/em> keep me coming back to dip a toe in here and there. Particularly interesting in this one is exploration of the “pop-out effect,” which the after-matter in the deluxe edition explains:<\/p>\n We chose to treat the page not as a flat 2-D surface upon which panels were “pasted” down flat but as a virtual 3-D space in which panels could be “hung” and “rotated” or stacked one on top of the other. … This is a completely new way of depicting high-speed action which only comics can do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When my mother found me reading comic books, she would always say, dismissively, “Don’t strain your brain!” That came back to me ironically about this graphic novel (originally issued as 3 comics)–it is a strain for me to read image-heavy\/text-light books. The creators described this as “Western Manga,” which captures the type of wordless narration. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":350,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions\/350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}