David Brame

The tale starts with creepy suspense complete with the ominous illustrations of a horror comic. It seems a supernatural game of tag, where the next person tagged as It is destined for doom. And step by step the suspense and paranoia build for the protagonist, a Chicago Police detective vacationing with her grandmother and great-aunt in Nigeria, when a ghoulish young boy with his brains leaking out of his head knocks on the door one dark and stormy night. The supernatural horrors come, but show more surprisingly the policewoman survives. In the end this is a story about healing from trauma to become a wounded healer.

The art: the lines, colors, and lettering are fitted to the narrative wonderfully. It’s an excellent rendition of Okorafor’s short story. show less

Wow, what a great story! It’s like a tale of Nigerian spiritualism from Chinua Achebe run through a filter of Clive Barker with a dash of Evil Dead thrown in. I can’t say too much without spoilers, but this was such a creepy and engrossing read for me. It’s rife with imagination and moments of straight up horror.

I loved the emphasis on Nigerian spirits and folklore. I also appreciated its attempt to explore Chioma’s double consciousness through a lens of magical identity. And the art show more is so cool in a fantastical sort of way. It does inventive and amazing work with the pages and panels like I’ve never seen before in a comic, every border bleeding into another and overlaid with smaller images to reflect the conflict and Chioma’s emotional state. It’s hard to explain, you just need to see it for yourself!

My only complaint is that the ending left me without a clear understanding of what all had taken place. That and the copy on netgalley is pretty fuzzy and hard to read at times. I truly wish I had a physical full-color copy of this beauty. show less

On the anniversary of his mother's death and with his family on the verge of eviction, 15-year-old Darius goes along with his friend's stupid get-rich-quick scheme. Things start to go wrong when Darius' little sister tags along, then get worse when his partner brags on social media that they made a huge score. Now they are miles from home and easy targets as they have to cross the territory of several different Chicago street gangs to get back to their own South Side neighborhood.

The story show more kicks off pretty strong, suggesting it's an urban homage to The Odyssey or at least a stab at The Warriors 2: Shorty Boogaloo, but it gets bogged down as the center trio spends so much time bickering over their string of bad decisions. My interest waned, the confrontation with the Big Bad fizzled, and the denouement felt too fast, too tidy, and rather pointless.

I think I might have liked this at about half the length. show less

A thirtysomething Nigerian American police officer from Chicago falls into some supernatural something or other with visions and body horror during a visit to her grandmother in Nigeria. I haven't read the original story, but this adaptation left me a bit confused and mostly indifferent, especially since it does not seem well-done, with words and images sometimes out of sync or outright contradicting each other: a pink lizard is blue, the stone face of a monster suddenly transforms into the show more wood mask with which (uh-oh) it has been depicted for the last eight pages. The art is a bit too cartoony to ever seem scary or ominous.

By the end it seems like the set-up for a sequel that might be more interesting. show less