Snotgirl – Comic Book Review (Spoiler-Free)

Hello everyone 😀 Today I bring you something a little different… A comic book review! (Or a comic series review, to be exact.)

I don’t know how many of you actually read comics but I hope you can still enjoy this post ❤ (If for nothing else, at least for the cover love… I mean, just look at it!) Also, the story revolves around a blogger, which is just so cool 🙂

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This review is completely spoiler-free.

• Title: Snotgirl – Volume 1 (Issues #1-#5)
• Author: Bryan Lee O’Malley & Leslie Hung
• Publisher: Image Comics
• Publication Date: February 28^th, 2017
• Page Count: 144

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Lottie Person is a fashion blogger with a perfect life… On social media. In reality, Lottie’s allergies give her hell, her friendships are superficial and her boyfriend has decided to break up with her. When a mysterious girl appears, Lottie’s world turns upside down…

 

I actually got this for my boyfriend on his birthday (he’s a big Scott Pilgrim fan) so I wasn’t exactly interested in reading it at first. It was only after opening it and seeing the art inside that I decide to give it a shot. It honestly looked so cute!

Plus, it’s about a blogger! (A fashion blogger, but a blogger nonetheless) So I was intrigued. In the end, though, we were both left a bit underwhelmed.

 

The artwork. It has this manga-like feeling to it, looking glossy and so cute you want to eat it. I wasn’t familiar with Leslie Hung‘s work but I’ve definitely become a fan! It goes really well with the story and makes the characters all the more interesting.

I think the author really succeeded in getting into a twenty something fashion blogger girl’s head. Which, for a dude in almost his forties, is quite an achievement. He even got the blogging/internet/texting lingo right, without making it sound super fake or forced.

I enjoyed how he explored the whole social media world and its superficiality. We really get a sense of what goes on in the life of these “influencers” and how they spend their time, their general thoughts, and their relationships.

Lottie can be quite the obnoxious and unlikable person, but I actually liked her. She was fascinating, in a very weird kind of way. I was also able to empathize with her and her issues (#struggles) even though I didn’t exactly experience them myself.

The fact that she was just the right amount of vulnerable and confident, naive and shrewd, really made her come to life. She’s the kind of person you feel you’ve met somewhere, at one point (and probably decided not to be friends). Plus, she owns up to her flaws and admits she’s not a nice person, which I find refreshing.

I really loved the unapologetic tone of this comic, as a whole. It was probably one of the reasons why it was so easy to connect with it. We all have our skeletons, after all.

 

The transitions were sometimes sloppy, which made the story confusing and hard to follow. There were moments where I felt really lost and unable to piece events together, thus failing to get the desired impact of what was happening.

It was like someone had ripped a page or two, because it definitely felt like something was missing in between scenes. I don’t know if it was on purpose or not, since the story does have a “mystery” vibe to it, but it didn’t work for me. It just made me feel frustrated.

The side characters were poorly explored. Again, I understand this might have been on purpose to illustrate just how self-centered Lottie is, but I would have liked to get to know her friends, ex, etc. a bit better. Their only purpose so far seems to be showing off Lottie’s crappy personality, which is fine but I was really looking forward to finding out more stuff about them.

It’s not like they’re likeable either, though, because they’re all pretty awful people. I think the only sane, coherent person in all of it was Esther, but she had so little screen time that you might as well blink and miss her.

Oftentimes, the characters felt unnecessarily sketchy and just plain weird. Their actions were never explained and Lottie never made a point to comment on them, which makes me think she either didn’t care or didn’t notice. They were all skimmed, at best.

 

I liked Snotgirl a lot, but there were just too many inconsistencies for me to truly love it.

The artwork was amazing and probably my favorite part of it. The story was cool enough, with many great details regarding the social media craze and its “influencers”. The main character, Lottie, was very well-designed and thought out, and really exposed the ugly side of being internet famous. The side characters were okay, for the most part, but needed some flesh in them.

All of it would have been enough if Snotgirl was just about the daily life of a twenty five year old fashion blogger making it in the real world. But it’s not. It has that “plot” going on that, in my opinion, was just too messy to work and left me feeling disoriented and annoyed.

I’m still hoping the next issue (coming out July 5th) will clear some things up, but I think it’ll be a while before everything is laid out. I also think Snotgirl needs to be read more than once, as my reading experience was much better the second time around.

Overall, I think this comic book is worth it. But maybe wait until more issues are out so you’re not left hanging like me…

 

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Final Rating:

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Let me know if I should do more comic book reviews! 😊

Thank you so much for reading and until next time!

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What did you think of this review? Have you heard of Snotgirl? (＾་།＾)