Space Mounties, vol. 1: Les mondes stochastiques, by Guilhem and Veys 5.5

Oof… what can I say about this book?

It was given to me by a friend who didn’t like it enough to keep it, and he bought it from the local library’s discount bookstore – it was on their shelves, as part of their collection, but there wasn’t enough demand to keep it there.

Not a good omen, but sometimes there are nice surprises along the way, so I figured “why not?”.

After all, I like the kitschy premise: that after Earth won an intergalactic war, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been charged with keeping the peace. And I like that it would these would be humourous space adventures.

But that’s about it, as it turns out.

The humour isn’t really funny (maybe it would be to an 8 year-old?), the lead characters are lame and unrelatable, the storytelling is amateurish and the art is decent, but not great.

The worst part is that the end of the book has two tacked-on mini-adventures that are so sad, like afterthoughts – as though the book wasn’t long enough. And yet they could have given the primary adventure a proper ending instead of abruptly wrapping it up…

This isn’t an entire waste of time, but the next volume would have to be exceptional for me to consider reading it.