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A review by tumbly_weed
Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened by James W. Powell, Jason Rodriguez
4.0
I'm surprised by the number of negative reviews for this book, it was a bit of a tough call for me to put 4/5 rather 5/5, in fact.
I picked this book up and flipped to one of the (many) sad, moving stories and immediately bought it as a gift for my then-boyfriend-now-husband. It's true many of the stories are sad, but I find this makes sense with the medium they're derived from: postcards of people that the artists don't know, almost all of whom have certainly died, and a sense of loss and "missed connection" between the present-day reader of the card and the unknown author. I think this inevitably results in a more sober view. That said, many of the stories are not just similar in that regard, but a bit over the top dramatic and tragic, which is where I deducted a star. I think more creativity could've drawn out different types of stories, even if they all had this level of seriousness.
I don't read a lot of graphic novels (not now at least), but I really enjoyed the artwork styles, and liked the fact that they fit well with each other. I also appreciated being able to see the postcard at the beginning of each story, but I would've rather had a full page view of the postcard so that I could read and appreciate the postcard better, rather than having the editor's comments about and reason for picking that card, which were often redundant.
Tl;dr This anthology is a pleasure to read and have, and is a nice gift for anyone, whether or not they're "into" graphic novels, because the content is universal, sentimental and lovely.
I picked this book up and flipped to one of the (many) sad, moving stories and immediately bought it as a gift for my then-boyfriend-now-husband. It's true many of the stories are sad, but I find this makes sense with the medium they're derived from: postcards of people that the artists don't know, almost all of whom have certainly died, and a sense of loss and "missed connection" between the present-day reader of the card and the unknown author. I think this inevitably results in a more sober view. That said, many of the stories are not just similar in that regard, but a bit over the top dramatic and tragic, which is where I deducted a star. I think more creativity could've drawn out different types of stories, even if they all had this level of seriousness.
I don't read a lot of graphic novels (not now at least), but I really enjoyed the artwork styles, and liked the fact that they fit well with each other. I also appreciated being able to see the postcard at the beginning of each story, but I would've rather had a full page view of the postcard so that I could read and appreciate the postcard better, rather than having the editor's comments about and reason for picking that card, which were often redundant.
Tl;dr This anthology is a pleasure to read and have, and is a nice gift for anyone, whether or not they're "into" graphic novels, because the content is universal, sentimental and lovely.