I read Beddor's Looking Glass War series and enjoyed it but I wanted to know more about Hatter M! I was excited to see that this graphic novel was supposed to cover just that...Hatter M's backstory. Unfortunately the artwork was vague and hard to follow and the story itself didn't add nearly as much as I had hoped.

This graphic novel starts the story of Hatter M's years searching our world for Alyss. In this novel he finds a girl he thinks is Alyss and tries to save her from an evil Countess who is set on draining her imagination. Also drawn into the story is a reporter who wants a good story from Hatter M.

I had a hard time with this graphic novel. I didn't find the story all that engaging and the artwork was hard to follow. For large portions of the story it was hard to even tell what Hatter M was doing from frame to frame. The writing itself is pretty sparse so you are depending on the illustration to add a lot to the story. With the illustration so hard to follow it just didn't work for me.

There some interesting elements in the story. Hatter M gets involved with a secret society that is trying to drain white imagination from imaginative children. It is also amusing to watch as Hatter M tries to navigate the differences between Wonderland and our world. We get flashes of back story that show what transpired when Hatter M was forced to leave the Queen's side and hide Alyss; we get to see how Alyss was lost as well.

Overall I found the whole novel to be okay. There are some interesting additions to the story; it was great to get some more background on Hatter M and to fill out some of the events that transpired while Hatter M was searching for Alyss. The inclusion of this mysterious society in our world adds to the mystery in the story. The artwork is very hard to follow though and the story is sparse. With the story so dependent on the artwork and the artwork hard to follow I was a bit disappointed. I don't think I will reading future installments in the Hatter M graphic novel series. This might be a good read for a die-hard Looking Glass Wars fan; but it didn't add enough to the story for me to stay interested.

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Very nice illustrations. The story is a good fill-in for what's left out of the books.

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This is supposed to be a telling of Hatter M's adventures during all of those years he was searching for Princess Alyss in the real world. The idea is that it is pieced together from his own journals left behind in our world along with random ephemera concerning him like old newspaper articles and what not.

The art in this book was what I found most lacking. The dialog ran like a manga. It was sparse and tried to allow the images to speak instead. The only problem was that the art was so ephemeral it was often hard to piece together the characters actions. Most pages did not have backgrounds, and was set up like an American comic with all squares and an easy to follow format. Again the issue here is that this format should have relied on heavy text, which was absent.

The plot itself was also somewhat lacking. The first attempt he makes at finding Alyss is in Budapest and leads him to a violin prodigy who is kidnapped by some kind of cult who want her glow. The idea was solid, but the execution lacked detail, characterization, and believability (for as much as a fantasy story warrants at least).

All in all I really enjoyed the first book The Looking Glass Wars and had hoped that this iinsallment would add some more depth and tension to the original novel. I thought it might help to fill in the blanks where we were experiencing life with Alyss. Instead though it has only muddled and confused the character of Hatter and lessened him a bit by trivializing him. This added nothing to the world of Wonderland and instead seems to be an attempt on the part of the author to continue to cash in on his ideas.

I do have volume 2 on hold for me at the library though so I will read the next volume and can only hope that it improves over the first installment.

Be aware this will be highly confusing if you have never read the original books by Frank Beddor since the story related here is so disjointed and hole-y.

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