Written by: Aly Fell
Art by: Aly Fell
Publisher: Dark Horse
Despite only hearing about The Shadow Glass relatively recently, I had high hopes for it. Conceptually, it sounded like it had the potential to be a cool period piece. In a sense, it succeeds at being that. Fell’s art alone establishes the time period. She nails pretty much everything about the era, and the book definitely has a pretty rad aesthetic. In fact, my favorite pages are the ones in which Fell gets out of her own way. There’s a sequence of two pages about halfway through the book with no dialogue, and those two pages are stunning.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many other pages like this. Most of the book gets bogged down with the excessive use of dialogue. Now, normally I’m not going to hold this against a book – I’m a sucker for dialogue heavy series and I try to be forgiving when it comes to set up in debut issues. The problem in The Shadow Glass is that the dialogue is largely overwrought. It feels mired in melodrama – and perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps it’s a self aware joke that I’m not in on.
However, I don’t really think that’s the case. There are a couple scenes where the dialogue is pretty solid, but it never sticks. And it really, really hurts the characters. Pretty much every character in the book seems like they could be interesting. They have potential. But their dialogue is overwritten to the point of being almost laughable. It’s a shame really, because I actively wanted to enjoy this book. There’s kind of a lack of books taking place in this era, and a well done period piece could have been exceptional. But for everything that the aesthetic does to establish that, there’s a line of dialogue that just ripped me out of that immersion.
At some point, I found myself wishing that this book was released with just the art. I’ve already said that it looks great, but the visual storytelling would be more than enough to convey to the reader exactly what is happening. Obviously, some dialogue is necessary, but man, Fell does such a much better job conveying emotion through facial expressions and body language than she does using dialogue.
So The Shadow Glass #1 is a book I really loved about 50% of, and was not at all impressed with the other 50%. I’m not sure this has ever really happened before. I mean, there have been books where I like the writing, and don’t like the art, or vice versa. But it’s never been to this extreme, so that’s kind of odd for me. Anyways, I don’t think I can really recommend this book. I guess it could get better, but maybe just flick through the pages at some point to look at the art.
