I’d heard excellent things about Mind the Gap and saw that the reviews were quite favorable, so imagine my surprise when I found myself disappointed by this first volume.

I can sum up my dissatisfaction with one simple reason: I did not care about a single character.

Ellis, the main character, is attacked in the subway and taken to the hospital.  There she has physically entered a coma but her psyche has traveled to the astral plane where she interacts with other coma sufferers.  Elle must work out her own attack as she struggles to remember even the most basic of facts about herself.

The list of potential attackers is quite large: her mother, her father, her brother, her boyfriend, a few doctors, as well as what is implied to be a clandestine organization of some sort.  But here’s the thing – Elle is not especially likable.  Frankly, nothing about her character makes me sympathize with her nor do I really care who attacked her.  This is, of course, a problem when the entire series appears to be hanging on that core plot point.

The dialogue jarred me a bit as well.  The problem with trying to write trendy, cool dialogue is that it becomes dated rather quickly and if a reader happens to be neither trendy nor cool (such as me), the dialogue reads incredibly hokey.

Finally, the art is beautiful, but I did not find it particularly dynamic.  Each panel, for the most part, depicts a person or people talking.  There isn’t much that I would consider visually striking or fluid.  Yes, the artist is very good at drawing people and backgrounds, but I didn’t feel it moved the story along well.  Granted, it would be difficult to draw page after page of people talking and doing not much else.

A protagonist who is not all that charismatic, a mystery that isn’t especially important to me, cheesy dialogue, and largely uninteresting artwork – Mind the Gap did not impress.