I was given this book as a review copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.

This may contain mild spoilers.

This is a tentative 3 star graphic novel for me.

The positives about this novel are the art (obviously) and the basic story.
I enjoyed this as a quick, pretty, ghost story.

The negative aspects of this graphic novel are as follows:

1. The Characters
Berenice is quite boring. She's nice enough, but I'm not attached to her. Nathan is boring till the end of the novel. Boston is a character that I've never read about before and I can't say I'm dying to again. He could be fantastic in other works, but from what I've seen he's just a bland, ghost, hero. Adelia was fine. Just your typical confused ghost.

Now let's talk about Sam. Just to be petty, I'll be ranting a bit. I'm kind of disappointed in the artistic portrayal of Sam. They are supposed to be non-binary, but Sam was drawn overly masculine to the point where I just thought he was male. I have no idea how Boston mistook them for female before Berenice explained their gender identity. That's just a minor thing to pick at.
Continuing on to the main point: Sam represents one of the most annoying tropes that I see in various works of fiction all the damn time. They represent having a character that is somehow diverse, without any other noticeable features or backstory. This is not enough. I hate it when a character is gay, black, or transgender and that's their whole personality. It's a lazy trope, especially when you have a character like Sam who isn't even a side character. Honestly, as a bisexual woman, I just don't care. I wish fiction(and I suppose the world) could just move past labels that people can't control and don't chose about themselves. It's stupid to continue proudly flaunting a label instead of actually being an interesting person.

2. Being Forgettable
Works of fiction can move and inspire people in ways that one may not even understand. You know a story is special when you keep thinking about it over and over again. A story can say something about life, philosophy, or society. This is not one of those works of fiction.
It was a fun book. That's it. The art was lovely to look at, but the story just wasn't that memorable to me.
A ghost trying to find her murderer as she's trapped in the mansion where she was killed.
I've heard many versions of that tale.

That's all I have to say on the matter.

Harley

This ended up not quite being what I was expecting, and it was weird in a way that I think only comic books can be. As I was lost over pretty much everything dealing with Boston, I'm fairly certain that there was more before this collection that would have explained things for me. The story itself was interesting with a nice twist at the end, but overall I didn't really get into it all that much. It was just so darn corny. And I really didn't like the whole relationship flip flop thing going on. I'm not cool with people in a relationship leading another on and then ending up together with them at the end of the story. Also, why did a guy what to be considered a "they"??? Was this more PC writing being thrown in my face?

What really drew me to this read was the name. I've never heard of Darkman, and the Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love just sounds so strange. I love it. The story started out a little slow for me, but once I got into it, I couldn't put it down.

I gave it three stars although I only made it about 50pages in and then gave up. The art work is amazing, but the story was a little slow. the main reason I gave up, was because the only format available was the pdf which I couldn't access on my ipad. It made the entire reading experience too tedious and frustrating, not to mention veeeeeery slow. Maybe consider making it available to download onto kindle which can then be accessed on a tablet through the app. It was close to impossible to read it in the pdf format. Sorry, I tried. I think if the story had kept my attention a little more, I may have put up with the annoyance of the reading experience.

A cool art style and story line in this graphic novel.