Graphic Novel Review: Spectacle Vol. 1 by Megan Rose Gedris

*I was given a copy of Spectacle Vol.1 in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Megan Rose Gedris and Oni Press*

Synopsis:

Pragmatic engineer Anna works as a psychic in the Samson Brothers Circus, but she doesn’t believe in anything supernatural—until her twin sister Kat is murdered and comes back as a very demanding ghost. Sharing a room with her sister was hard, but now they’re sharing a body while trying to identify the killer. With few leads, a troupe full of secretive folk, and strange paranormal occurrences popping up around the circus, solving the case seems near impossible. But the murderer in their midst may be the least of their problems…

Review:

Firstly, let’s talk about the art style. This one is pretty cool, but it isn’t my favourite. A lot of the pages felt too busy and I often found my eyes straying from the text to look at the details of the illustrations. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it actually means a lot of time and effort went into creating this graphic novel, but I’m someone that gets distracted very easily so it was hard to focus.

One thing I did really love is how vibrant Spectacle is. Every page was filled with colour and it really gave the story movement. The cover alone can prove this.

I’m a big fan of murder mysteries and the fact that this one is set in a travelling circus is really interesting. I am however struggling to remember whether the mystery has been solved yet or if it was left as a cliffhanger.

This brings me to my next point of the story (right now) being a little too forgetful. I remember certain details about the deputy sheriff and Anna working with a cast member but that’s about it. I do have plans to continue reading the series as they are available up until Vol.3 on Kindle Unlimited, so I’ll probably review those too. The rest are available on Netgalley so I will be reading them through there. This time making notes as I go so I don’t forget anything.

There isn’t much to say on the characters as this was very much an introduction to the world, but hopefully in the next volumes, there will be plenty of development both plot and character-wise.

Overall Spectacle was a decent graphic novel which I am sure is just the beginning of an excellent series. Unfortunately, I cannot rate this more than three stars as there were no real stand-out moments, it was just ok.