Not bad, but pretty heavy on tropes. Manic pixie dream girl, geeky outsider boy who fixates on said dream girl, that whole thing. That said, it still made me think, and made me feel a bit for the characters. It's not breaking new ground, but might be a great fit for someone who is into the style and theme. ( )

I picked this up because I had read 'In the Flesh' by the same author. This one is a glorious full-colour comic about first love, with science-fictional elements. Victor is a nerdy teenager who yearns for a seemingly unattainable beautiful, rich, popular girl named Patty, who sits next to him in History class. One day Patty has an accident which destroys half of her body. Her father, a robotocist, replaces the broken parts with cybernetics. Patty is restored, but changed. She begins a self-destructive spiral of behaviour, and Victor is caught in it. The tale is about teenage angst and feelings of exclusion, and how being beautiful and rich doesn't necessarily make you happy. The science-fictional elements are secondary. ( )

Patricia Partzlaus is a beautiful and rich girl, all but unattainable to the geeky high school boy, Victor Steiner, who has a crush on her, until the day she is struck by a car and has an experimental procedure replacing a large portion of her body with the bionic parts her dad happens to be developing at his tech company. She then spends the rest of the book being moody about her new condition while Victor follows her around like a puppy that she has no problem occasionally kicking.

Instead of exploring any of the science fiction aspects of the change, the story is content to wallow in teen angst with underage drinking, nudity, sexting, smoking and all the other things I didn't do as a teen.

Way too long and dull. A very disappointing follow-up to the author's excellent The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television. ( )