I've never been as big a fan of Looking Glass as I am of the first book. I think this might be because Looking Glass reads to me like it was written as a book, rather than told as a story. There's far more structure to this tale than the last, made plain by the overt references to chess. There's a nice conceit in this comic that whenever Alice moves from square to square, it's as if she's entering yet another looking-glass. She vanishes from one setting and appears at another. Sometimes it's off-putting for her, sometimes not.
I also hadn't realized just how much poetry/song is in this book. More, I think, than the last. And while I appreciate the nonsense rhymes, I don't always find it so interesting to read panels of someone reciting them.
Erica Awano's art is still brilliant. She evokes a weird realness to this dream landscape, which, to be honest, makes the comic slightly unsettling. The events and characters in the narrative simply cannot happen in reality, but the realism of Ms. Awano's backgrounds seems to fly in the face of that idea. It's a nice effect, though, again, I think it was of more use in the more Discordian Wonderland than the mathematically-precise Looking Glass.
More to come...
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