'Gang of Fools' with story and art by James Otis Smith is a dystopian graphic novel with a very apt title.

The story is told through a varied series of lowlifes and hustlers. One is just trying to make rent, one is making a porn movie that the Russian mob are interested in, and so on.

I liked the idea of this better than the execution. The art is rough angular lines. The interlinked stories make it hard to find a likeable protagonist. The hardest thing for me was just following the various storylines and wanted to even care.

While I liked the near-futuristic take on social media, popularity, music, gender/sexuality, etc., all the interweaving characters and plot points came together messily. Additionally, the character designs and pacing further muddled the reading experience.

I received an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’m beyond confused with this one. It’s really hard to read the dialogue and in turn, understand the storyline. Who are these people and why are all these new people being introduced at a frantic rate? I also really disliked the artwork.

This just wasn’t for me unfortunately

I wasn’t that impressed by Gang of Fools. This story starts off not so strong, and only got weirder as it moved along. The characters weren’t that likable, and honestly the story itself was kind of hard to follow. After reading it, I am unsure what this graphic novel was even about. Some people may enjoy it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

I wanted to like this. There's some good social commentary here. There was just so much else I hated. The characters were completely unlikable. The art was hard to follow. The story flitted all over the place. By the time I was half way through, I was ready to walk in front of a train. At that point I decided to walk away from this book forever.

This was so bad in most of the aspects to me. I didn't like the writing, I did not like the art at all, I don't know, I couldn't get into that at all, I had to read it like 10 times repeatably before I finished it. And it looked so promising to me...

hard to read because of the format and it really didn't capture my attention.

i'll have to passs on this and move on to a new book as this turned out to be really not for me.

I couldn’t get into this, it didn’t hook me and keep me interested. There’s too many story lines going on and moved too fast. I feel like they fit too much text on the panels.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with an ARC.

Well, this is a tough one for me. The summary for this comic sounded like something I would love, but I had a lot of trouble finding that premise in the actual comic. I'll say that I did like the illustrations and I do think they fit the dark punk vibes, but honestly I have no idea if it actually fit the story as a whole because I am so confused about what was actually going on. Those first 10 pages I was completely lost. I read each page twice, just to be sure I wasn't missing something, and I still had no idea what was going on. So, overall, I'd say the story and execution needs a lot of work. The art style worked for me, but that's about it, and that makes me pretty sad. Such a great premise, and I didn't see that fleshed out in the comic.

Gang of Fools has some fun and gritty artwork as well as a cool story. I'll definitely be recommending this one to patrons.

So I read the first 30-ish pages of this and then I kind of just flipped through and looked at the pictures for the rest of it. I agree with other reviewers that I might have had more patience for this as a physical book rather than an ebook, but even just getting through those 30 pages was exhausting and took forever. There is just a lot going on - both in terms of disjointed plot lines and a large amount of text on the page - and I could not focus on it. Also, while the art style itself is decent enough, the entire thing is in black and white and I rely heavily on color cues to keep things straight in graphic novels so that never really works out well for me. I did give it two stars instead of one because from what I saw there was a lot of really on-point social commentary here, but it was way too dense for me to actually get through.

I really didn't like this.

And Dystopian settings are usually among my favorites but I just couldn't get myself to like Gang of Fools. I felt a fool reading it because it came across as very chaotic. There are so many story lines, all of which we are old just slightly to little to either completely get it or care about the character. I got the idea the author just wanted to throw as much as possible at the reader in hope of shocking them. I'm sure it was a clever story, but it really wasn't for me. Also the art didn't work for me, it felt rushed at some times and chaotic at others, filling the panels with a lot of text and characters.

It really wasn't for me.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Finished reading this in a day. Enjoyed the characters and the plot of the story. The artwork was good as well.

So...

The story is good and clever, is somewhat contrived.

Unfortunately, I actively disliked the art. The art, dialogue boxes, details - it's just too dense. Maybe if I had this comic novel in print my feeling would be different. As an ADE (Adobe Digital Editions) file it's hardly readable.

ARC through NetGalley

This a unique and quite engaging piece with much to commend it, especially for its target audience.
It is set in a possible future where technology drives every aspect of your live; to the point where your existence is more akin to a computer game where trading skills and abilities could mean the difference between life and death. Where personal rating is all important and you seem to be in constant competition with others sharing this reality.
It is aimed at young people and I am sure they will get more of the story, the one-liners and laugh out loud moments, as well as much of the techno-babel.
As hinted I am not an immediate fit for this comic although I did understand some of the humour and appreciate the story at times.
However, I could read it another four times and not be any the wiser.
There is a passage within the story that sums up my position I think: “This conversation confuses me.
I am maybe too old ........”
Make your own minds up; my aged response rather than conservative approach may still encourage younger minds to embrace it more readily. My real critique is not about story or plot, although it is difficult at times to follow. It concerns the rapid and disjointed moving from one storyline to another. The context is not always clear, names are not always shared and the artwork just in black and white makes establishing characters and setting very hard.
After a while I tired of flipping back to keep up, as it was undermining my reading pleasure I read on and muddled through.

There is . . . an awful lot going on here, to say the least. There's a murder-for-hire plot, several romantic entanglements, dangerous courier jobs and kidnappings, a man with the head of a jackal, and probably some others that I missed... all of which seem to intersect or orbit around one another with no real throughline or definitive conclusion when the book wraps up. There are some great moments and the art is very hip, but this was just a little too jumbled for me to really make sense of. I have a feeling that it might work better for me in print, where I could flip back and forth to connect plot points -- but as an advance copy in Adobe Digital Editions, that's a non-starter. I'll probably revisit this when it comes out to see if it grows on me.

Deadpan Cool

In my reading experience, (and I could be way off base here), comics and graphic novels that try to be hip and cool and edgy often go so far overboard that they read poser and look phony even as they sink under the weight of their own faux hipster coolosity. When this was blurbed as "a vivid look at our dystopian future,... with equal parts contemporary street life and speculative cyberpunk-like techno-consequences..." I was interested, although my defenses still went up. But then, when I saw the subtitle of Part 1 - "Problem Solving Through Sex and Vandalism" , I knew I'd found my next favorite thing.

This is funny the way the smartest, cleverest, wittiest people you know, (sitting around eating, drinking, smoking, flailing, failing, and flirting), are funny. There are deadpan throwaways, obscure edgy references, riffs and goofs, putdowns and putaways in every panel. There are also bitter truths and bits of insight worked in around the margins. There are winners and losers, and tough chicks, and softies, and schemers, and climbers, and wannabes, and of course everyone's a "social influencer", (which has become my favorite semantically null phrase). Somehow all of the characters, (and there are many, many characters), take on distinct personalities and leave distinct, unique and lasting impressions. And that's even though they exist in a world where some of the things they have to deal with - gender fluid tweaking, falling Q scores, virginity porn - don't even exist.

Amazingly, this all works even though it is wrapped around bits and pieces of at least a dozen partial or incompletely explained or realized plots. There's no single overall story arc that binds all of the characters, so they just pinball into each other as they go their separate but sometimes interrelated ways. There is murder for hire, conflict over a condo, romantic triangles and tetrahedrons, Russian mobsters, an independent porn movie, a jackal headed evil manipulator, violence, sex, multiple kidnappings, gender ambiguity, highway gunfire, revolutionaries, and mayhem in the streets.

All of that said, none of this is foolish, and all of it is smart and on point. Darned if that blurb didn't pretty much get it right. (Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)