Review by Booklist Review
College is supposed to be a new beginning for Mike and Shesh, offering the chance to forget about Shesh's addiction to massively multiplayer online games. But an innocent visit to the college's gaming club sets off a wave of madness when the Gamemaster unleashes Shesh's gaming-obsessed second personality. Thompson's love of gaming and background in manga make him a perfect fit to write a comic about gaming. The plot is funny and chaotic, though some of the many adorably offbeat characters get lost in the mix toward the end of this first volume. Hao's steady artistic hand keeps the action clear, even when shifting between fantasy and reality. A page in which the panels are part of a character sheet for a role-playing game displays a sharp eye for detail, a keen wit, and a firm grasp of the comics medium. Some comedic violence and the age of the characters skew this toward an older high-school audience, but Thompson and Hao have built a story that should appeal to both hard-core and casual gamers.--Wildsmith, Snow Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This comedy manga takes on the world of tabletop gaming by way of the shonen sports genre. Hardcore computer gamer Shesh Maccabee arrives for his freshman year of college banned by court order from the virtual universe he so loves. Despite his friend Mike's efforts to protect him from the Internet's siren song, Shesh finds the university gaming club, only to discover that Mages & Monsters is an analogue game, requiring dice, cards... and imagination. The two boys reluctantly join a game run by Theodore Dudek, a game master who goes to superhuman lengths to bring verisimilitude to the interactive stories he creates. As Shesh becomes more deeply immersed, Theodore realizes Shesh has the potential to become the greatest role player of all time. Thompson's enthusiasm for the subject matter is explosive and one can sometimes feel Hao's artwork rushing to keep up. With so much going on (sometimes on multiple, simultaneous, interrelated abstract levels of action), the narrative fights to stay coherent. None of this takes away from the best moments, always in the depths of a game, when the plot turns smartly on a hinge, and the intended audience for this manga is reminded why they first became gamers. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
