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This is a tough one for me to review. I generally get through books pretty quickly, with something the size of MuZz 1 usually taking me in the neighborhood of a day or two. But this one, I just had a hard time getting into it.
A lot of it is the art, and this is another reason this is hard to admit. I LOVE the art style of this book. I love the expressiveness, the detail, the variety. But I had an incredibly hard time sometimes keeping characters visually straight and telling them apart, which contributed to me just stepping away from this book for days on end. It's hard to keep track of the story when you can't always tell who's talking.
What I could tell of the story I did enjoy, but a lot of it was muddled due to the previously mentioned issue I was having. There were additional barriers - some of the scene transitions were jarring and left me puzzled, sometimes the dialogue didn't seem to make solid sense as a conversation and a lot of the concepts of this entirely new world are not in any way explained or defined, leaving me feeling more lost than our main characters.
These issues did start to ease up about the 2/3 point, and the last third of the story was, I thought, significantly stronger and more coherent.
I do wonder how much of it is *supposed* to not make sense. The world is introduced via a train full of forgotten creative ideas taking their final journey, and a lot of what we get here seems to be just that - ideas, whose connection to the overarching story are either tenuous or not yet explained.
Overall, its a really unique piece of art, and once it finds its footing and gives you characterization to sink your teeth into, it becomes something pretty compelling, but for me at least, I spent a good chunk of the reading time confused. Maybe I'm just too old for it. :)
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