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Beyond the Second Star, published by Splitting Head Press, is an Indie book that shows a good deal of promise. Created and written by Ann M Doria and penciled/inked by Frankie L Galang, Beyond is a sci-fi/fantasy tale focusing around a young woman named Tracer. The story is nothing particularly exciting, the details quickly fade from the mind. But neither is it particularly bad. What really saves it is Galang's well-detailed artwork. His people are realistically built and stand and move naturally, and the backgrounds are well-wrought.
Unfortunately, the dialogue is terrible. They have the ideas right, and the conversation might flow naturally in some places, except for the fact that Ms Doria obviously fails to grasp how punctuation works. This works to make the comic last longer, as you might have to take a few moments to decode the sentances. Have fun... Break out an ink pen and put in your own commas, apostrophes, and quotation marks! It's interactive!
Likewise, her use of contractions is spotty, and I tend to find that not using common contractions tends to make dialog sound unnatural, like everyone's a robot or something. At first read, I thought maybe this culture just didn't use them, but then I checked and saw that there were a few.
An odd note is that while the comic is set in another world (a flashback scene takes place on Earth, where Tracer seems to have spent some time), each of the first two comics begins with a quote from an Earth personality. Rosie O'Donnell in the first and Joyce Brothers in the second. I just felt like mentioning that.
If Ann Doria would just go take a quick refresher course in punctuation in dialog, I believe that this could be a book worth picking up in the future.
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