Cover Design: Craig Nash
On the website Skuds’ Sister’s Brother, Skuds in Life has written a review of An Android Awakes by Mike French and Karl Brown. Skuds starts by saying that, while reading the book, he kept thinking of a kaleidoscope because the various stories written by Android Writer PD121928 include characters and motifs that keep cropping up in different ways. He says that there are “enough ideas in the book to make several books”, which he says he felt when he read one of Mike French’s other books, which has the effect of keeping “the novelty coming” so that as well as “fresh events” you are “getting fresh character, scenarios and everything else every few pages” which he says can be exhausting but is never boring! He says that some of the characters will stay with you for a long time – he cites as examples the Button Man (“who has a real League of Gentlemen bizarre scariness to him”) and the superhero angels.
Pointing out that this is neither just a novel nor is it a typical graphic novel, he describes the illustrations as having a “similar feel to the old 2000 AD comic”. He concludes that you could “just read the words and ignore the pictures but you would be missing out” because although they don’t add to the plot they do “contribute greatly to the mood and tone of the book”.
You can read Skud’s full review here.