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Old City Blues #2
Old City Blues, Volume 2
The year is 2049. Southeastern Europe. Built on the ruins of the country once known as Greece, New Athens is a city crawling with life - low-life, that is. From mech smugglers and drug dealers, to corrupt politicians and all-too-powerful corporations, the city is at the mercy of high-tech criminals. And it's up to Solano, Thermidor, and the rest of the New Athens Special Police to keep the city in order.
200 pages, Paperback
First published October 22, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 26, 2014
Old City Blues Volume 2 by Giannis Milonogiannis feels like a reprint from the 90s. It's got a retro cyberpunk feel that throws me right back into those days, but it's a new series that harkens back to the comics and stories of that time.
The story takes place in New Athens which is built on the country once known as Greece. Solano is a hard-hitting cop who is harder on sleek patrol cars. He has a crew of Espers and computer hackers helping him stop crime. The enemies are high tech criminals using robots and cybersuits. There are corrupt criminals, corrupt cops, mech smugglers and drug dealers. Standing in their way is Solano.
Volume 2 contains two story arcs. The art is black and white, but has a lot of cross hatching and textures to it, so it's a bit busy and sometimes hard to figure out what is going on. I liked it and it made me feel nostalgic and want to find my old William Gibson novels.
I was given a review copy of this graphic novel by Diamond Book Distributors and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.
The story takes place in New Athens which is built on the country once known as Greece. Solano is a hard-hitting cop who is harder on sleek patrol cars. He has a crew of Espers and computer hackers helping him stop crime. The enemies are high tech criminals using robots and cybersuits. There are corrupt criminals, corrupt cops, mech smugglers and drug dealers. Standing in their way is Solano.
Volume 2 contains two story arcs. The art is black and white, but has a lot of cross hatching and textures to it, so it's a bit busy and sometimes hard to figure out what is going on. I liked it and it made me feel nostalgic and want to find my old William Gibson novels.
I was given a review copy of this graphic novel by Diamond Book Distributors and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.
March 11, 2014
The concept is really cool and I love the art style, but the dialogue and pacing can be improved. It has a lot of potential, but tends to jump the gun a lot and tries to bring about emotional reactions/conclusions to things without putting in the work of building the plot or characters.
September 26, 2019
Serviceable but I wouldn't spend money on this. It's fun with good style but too derivative.
February 23, 2020
A beautifully drawn cyberpunk Athens, with almost non-existant characters, an overreliance on action scenes, and a plot that'll put anyone to (cyber)sleep.
Our main character, detective Solano, talks as if he's an AI algorithm that has been force-fed cheesy action movie lines. We never get a sense of what kind of place New Athens actually is, how people live day to day, be they police or non-police. There hangs a whisp of cyber-noir atmosphere over the whole thing, although it never seems to affect the dialogue, which is plain and clichéd.
(Extra points deducted for suddenly introducing a country and character never mentioned before in the last act of the larger story..)
Visually it's quite beautiful and arresting, especially concerning architecture and technology, less so regarding characters, who seem to blend into one another. And at times the whole stylistically dips a bit too much into manga for my taste.
Overall it's a bit as if you took Blade Runner and you took out all the slower, introspective parts and just left the chases. For some that may sound like heaven, not so for me.
Our main character, detective Solano, talks as if he's an AI algorithm that has been force-fed cheesy action movie lines. We never get a sense of what kind of place New Athens actually is, how people live day to day, be they police or non-police. There hangs a whisp of cyber-noir atmosphere over the whole thing, although it never seems to affect the dialogue, which is plain and clichéd.
(Extra points deducted for suddenly introducing a country and character never mentioned before in the last act of the larger story..)
Visually it's quite beautiful and arresting, especially concerning architecture and technology, less so regarding characters, who seem to blend into one another. And at times the whole stylistically dips a bit too much into manga for my taste.
Overall it's a bit as if you took Blade Runner and you took out all the slower, introspective parts and just left the chases. For some that may sound like heaven, not so for me.
November 23, 2013
I kind of slid through this book but it did inject me with some bit of nostalgia. A memory I've not visited in years wafted by, tinged with a bitter-sweetness that comes with knowing these moments are lost always except in your head. A flea market, a corner store, and a Goodcents were within a mile from my address at the time, and I would frequent these places, especially the dusty promises of the flea market. The corner store sold Crystal Pepsi and unconventional comics. I'd come upon my first exposure to manga, and it was very much in a style similar to this except for Old City Blues' profusion of halftone. Kinda pointless tangent here...
Old City Blues has cool cyberpunk elements, mindfuck codes, surrogate bodies, electronic gangsters. These leap out in intervals for interesting speculations of latter day applications and all that. Otherwise any other details escape me. It was a good quick read for me.
Old City Blues has cool cyberpunk elements, mindfuck codes, surrogate bodies, electronic gangsters. These leap out in intervals for interesting speculations of latter day applications and all that. Otherwise any other details escape me. It was a good quick read for me.
March 6, 2014
I feel like this volume departs even more from the material that obviously inspired it and really comes into it's own. Milonogiannis' art gives this volume a life that was actually not nearly as vibrant in the first volume. The world building in this volume is a lot more solid as well. My biggest complaint is that this book is a fraction of the size of the nice vol 1 hardcover. So the pages are a lot smaller and the two volumes don't look so hot sitting next to each other on the shelf.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews