I wish I could wash my eyes out with bleach.

I have absolutely NO idea what I just read. Reading this felt like watching the fever dream of a guy who got high on LSD while playing Dungeons and Dragons and then fell asleep on the table while Game of Thrones played in the background. Literally nothing about this made sense. You’re just thrust into an extremely confusing world,
follow a random one dimensional character back and forth in time as a bunch of weird nonsensical stuff happens, there’s never an explanation for anything that happens, and you’re forced to look at numerous hideous panels of unnecessarily violent and nude scenes.


If I could give this less than 1 star, I would.

I enjoyed reading the graphic novel Motro.V1 even through it was a bit on the strange side, the artwork was good as well.

There’s a lot of weird shit in Motro that I enjoyed. Things like raising vehicles like pets until they grow up and you can ride them or how old people revert to the size of babies, but still manage to walk around. Weird has never bothered me and usually is a huge draw for me.

The problem with Motro is that that story isn’t weird enough, and it’s one that I would dub the reluctant king trapped by his own destiny. I have just summed up the entirety of Motro for you minus the character moments that define any story. As weird as the elements in the story are, the plot itself isn’t weird enough giving a strange disconnect between the two.

Then there’s the artwork, which is brilliant, but also full of weirdness. The art grabs you and makes you want to find out more about this world and why the people look the way they do. It’s detailed and yet kind of soft and goofy looking. There’s another disconnect here too. The art seems almost comical at times, and I admit when I originally read the first chapter/issue of this series, I laughed and enjoyed most of it because of the humor. What I discovered when I read the rest of the book was that in no real way was this story trying to be funny. It’s actually a depressing tale, but not one that the art successfully captures from beginning to end. There are times that it amplifies the mood or sets the tone, but it always looks a bit comical.

Let’s talk about the strengths of the book for a moment and continue with the artwork. It’s clean and crisp with coloring that looks animated. This is some of my favorite style of coloring because it makes the comic and the world look so vibrant and real. No, the images aren’t photorealistic, but there is so much detail put into those simplified faces. That is a true mastery of artwork because everything looks incredibly easy to illustrate until you try it yourself. Artist’s will get what I mean instantly, but just look at Motro’s face, and you’ll see that in all that simplicity is a very detailed character.

As for the story, what does work quite well is the overall journey for Motro, even if it does feel out of place with the world. It’s still well told, up until the ending. I didn’t care for the ending, but the rest was well-plotted and managed to give all of Motro’s background without overbearing narration or pointless exposition. It was subtle and something that you needed to pay close attention to while reading. The dialogue at times was fantastic, and other times, it was generic but effective.

I wouldn’t put it past the creators to try and experiment and push these boundaries, but with any experiment, there’s successes and failures. Motro falls somewhere in-between. It weirdness makes it something worth checking out, but in the same swoop, the reluctant king storyline isn’t something new or even that different. It teeter-totters between new/exciting and familiar/average, but unfortunately the last page defines where it lands.

'Motro Vol. 1' by Ulises Farinas, Erick Freitas and Ryan Hill is the kind of book I finish and wonder what I just read. In this case, I enjoyed the strange journey.

This volume has three stories in the life of a strange man with superhuman strength named Motro. In the first, he is a young boy looking for his father. He is mocked and bullied to the point where he uses his strength to gruesome effect. Then he fights a prince and becomes a favorite son of a ruler.

It's a world of strange inventions. A mirror that shows the future, ice dragons, and tanks that seem to speak with emojis. The art is worth the journey. This is a world filled with strange characters that have a roundness to them. The lettering is even different. I liked what I read.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Oni Press, Diamond Book Distributors, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

I was enthralled by the art. It's this weird mishmash of Moebius, Geof Darrow and Studio Ghilbi. Set in a wild, apocalyptic future filled with frog-wizards and vehicles that communicate via emoji's . It's visually stunning. However the story was mostly incoherent. In broad strokes, the book is about Motro, a boy with the strength of 10 men. Just when you think the book is settling into the story, it'll jump forward several years into a completely unrelated scenario. It's jarring and leaves the reader wondering WTF is going on. Unfortunately, the unique world and art can't save terrible writing.

This graphic novel starts off with a reclusive boy who is terrified of the superhuman strength he possesses. From there, it branches off into several more plot lines, none of which follow through completely before shifting to the next one. This leaves the story feeling disjointed and incomplete. The artwork is incredibly detailed, but that can't make up for the lack of depth in the story.

I really enjoyed the visuals of this book. The reading was hard to follow, which diminished the story. There are many cool concepts in here that I would love to explore further if the writing was easier to digest.

I found this to be a very interesting idea with some strong ideas about fate, destiny and the price of leadership.
Sadly some of the scenes were cluttered and hard to read.
The third story was also in a sketchy black and white form. While the story was still interesting, I also feel with the way it ended abruptly that I may not have got the conclusion to the tale.
Still, I think it is worth a read.
(www.goodreads.com/review/show/1946637792)

This seemed interesting but upon reading it it's just not for me.

Occasionally, you come across a graphic novel that, for all its weirdness, captures your imagination and your attention. It draws you in. THis is not that book. Its weird, surely enough. But I didn't find it compelling. I barely understood what was going on. There was no sense of place, of history, of character.

Just too bonkers for its own good – a sci-fantasy world, where vehicles speak in pictograms, and things get weirder and weirder – and more and more inconsequential as we go. It might be down to this being a 112 page book and I only got 85 pp on my netgalley file, but I don't think it would ever make any sense.

Did not enjoy this graphic novel at all. The art at the very beginning was promising, but became grotesque as the story moved on. Entirely possible it just wasn't my style. The story itself was incredibly disjointed and jumped suddenly in time, location and plot with absolutely no warning or reason. The first segment in particular felt completely separate from the others, which were confusing in their own right, but at least had some sense of continuity.

A tiny motorcycle—I was hoping it was the main character—is in telepathic communication with a boy who has the power of ten men and even survives a direct blast from a tank. He has to save them all, according to his nightmare. He doesn’t want to fight, but has to, and eventually becomes the ruler’s new son. (Don’t ask what happened to the old one.)
Fifteen years later he’s basically in charge and wants to go on a quest, no matter how many of his soldiers die. Thirty-four years later, the world has turned to black and white, where reptiles are kidnapping babies. Yep, it gets that weird.
There are some fun touches. The bad guys’ tanks also communicate telepathically, but only in pictures, so they must be dumber than the motorcycle. This time it’s the frog that licks you to make magic, not the other way around.
But I found both the plot and the character development lacking. He says he doesn’t want to fight, but when he has to, he kills—no middle ground. Leads his men to icy death, but that’s okay, because he gets what he wants.
Strange ending. If there was a point to all this, I didn’t get it.
2.5 pushed up to 3/5

I had a very difficult time getting into this book and it isn't because it was written poorly or because it wasn't beautifully drawn. It was just really hard to follow. I felt as if the story bounced around a bit and it was difficult to keep the timeline in check. However, the art was fantastic and I think that I had been more interested in the particular subject matter, I would have enjoyed it much more.

Very fun art and cool concept but overall not really a story that grabbed me. I had a very hard time really caring about Motro's path through the story. I really think the story has a lot of potential, but it really wasn't for me.

<i>First off, full disclosure: I got a free ARC of this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review.</i>

I admit this one lost me a bit towards, but given the rather meta themes of memory, destiny and guiding authors from above, that's probably quite intentional. It'd probably reward a reread or ten.

What I did like was what I could follow on a page-by-page basis. <i>Motro</i> is a consciously mythic piece, evoking everything from Norse sagas to Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth; though there are times where it comes across as <i>Mad Max</i> as made by Studio Ghibli (and if that's not a quote worthy of a blurb I don't know what is).

But Farinas's artwork is what drew my attention to Motro and it is simply gorgeous. The pastel colours and Moebius-esque simplicity building into complexity give me a warm glow. He's also very clever in his composition; the use of pictograms in place of words is a great use of the form (I heart Wheeliebeast) and should be an inspiration to other creators.

<i>Motro</i> lost me, but it was a gorgeous walk.

The cover was the first thing to catch my eye. As an illustrator myself it's the first thing that attracts my attention. The art throughout the book I loved completely. The interesting appearances of the characters lead me to wonder about how they became this way from the apocalyptic setting, with a little whimsical feeling of Adventure Time. It took me a while to realize that the vehicles where actually living which I thought was a genius touch though it is a subtle part of the story. The main character, Motro, reminded me of an old hero by the name of Beowulf. A man of unnatural strength driven to his destiny, from saving a village to becoming king. To me this was a retelling of Beowulf in a end of the world scenario. I will absolutely recommend this comic to my friends and viewers.

Okay I have no idea what I just read but I actually enjoyed it!

This comic is bizarre and weirdly detailed, although the temporal leaps threw me off. The pacing felt disjointed, mostly because we only get snippets from the main character's boyhood, and then 15 years have passed, and then another 30??? There wasn't much explanation or forewarnings about what was gonna happen.

I couldn't enjoy the characters because there is barely any development, only the MC gets an actual storyline, while the rest are too simple. The worldbuilding was wonderful though, sort of apocalyptic in a strange way, both lively and brutal. The art was also delightful, filled with detail, and it's perfect balance between fantastic and grimy matched the odd plot and themes.

The art was interesting but I found the overall story too hard to follow. I'm intrigued by the fact the machines behave like domesticated animals but not enough to hold my interest for another volume.

Great art style and a compelling story line throughout. We'll definitely be getting this one for our library.