This wasn't my cup of tea. The art was convoluted and off-putting in many ways. The plot seemed meandering and inaccessible. I did like that it felt personal to the author but it just failed to extend a meaningful experience to the reader. I wanted to be moved or at the very least feel something, but I was very often left scratching my head and trying very hard to extrapolate meaning. It often felt like there was a personal conversation happening in which the reader wasn't invited to participate. Reading this left me feeling a bit alienated and hollow. I will add a caveat that I am not represented in the pages and as such might just be a problem of not being able to relate on an experiential level and I'm willing to say that is probably the case. But I can only review art through the lens of my own experience and as such, this wasn't something that gave me anything worth recommending.

The premise was an alternate universe that experimented with relationships and the freedom of it. There was also AI and technology everywhere.

It speaks about the ebb and flow of a relationship and how individuals grow along the way.

It wasn't quite my cup of tea and the writing was good.

Thank you #NetGally for giving me the opportunity to read this.

A beautifully told story about two men who meet after accidentally switching jackets. From such a simple act, love blooms.

It takes place in, I suppose what is a dystopian future. Usually, I do not like dystopian stories but the way this was presented actually held my interest. I liked the mix of the graphic novel and the style of a traditional book with text interspersed to help us follow the tale.

Like a real love story, these men find each other, fall in love, open up themselves only to find that they have made themselves more vulnerable than they had expected. Love can be hard, even cruel and an unkind world can just make that journey even harder on those who just want to love and be loved.

Thanks to @netgalley, Boom! Studios, and Jeremy Sorese for the opportunity to read this eArc in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion.

I’m typically now not partial to comics intermixing with prose, however this e book gave me an perception into how these mediums may be mixed and made into a shifting adult picture e-book. Sorese doesn’t deliver us an excessive amount of text at a time, simply sufficient to fill us in on and pique our interest in the global he’s developing. The text additionally made me stay with the e-book longer than i would with a natural graphic novel, which gave the story extra weight in my thoughts.

As for the narrative, it’s surprisingly individual driven and all those characters are wonderfully fleshed out. Their struggles provide us a better information of our personal, even supposing we live in a exclusive (albeit no longer completely exceptional?) global.

Sorese’s art style is heat and spherical and dare I say Muppet-like? but I think that’s what makes Sorese the sort of exquisite writer — he takes things we’re conversant in seeing in children’s books (image books, exaggerated expressions and sure, Muppets) and makes them paintings with deeper, more mature topics.

besides, a huge propose from me.

DNF at around 40%

I really enjoyed the art style of this book and I was quite into the presentation of the story. I liked how the book was divided and how there was text in between the panel to give more context about everything that was happening.

The blurb of this book does not state how it's a science fiction story and that quite blindsided me. I'm not really into science-fiction and I was quite confused by the events in the book because of it.

I just wasn't really into the content of the book, but I really liked how the book was presented.

Thank you to NetGalley and Boom Studios/Archaia for a free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Jeremy Sorese's The Short While has a lot of moving parts and is best absorbed slowly over a couple reading sessions. It was a beautiful and deeply moving story about love and happiness in a world that is not always kind.

Sorese's illustrations and sequential work were lovely, and I'm happy to have read this.

The low resolution artwork and occasional redacted word / letter made reading this ARC pretty frustrating, but the actual published version doesn’t have these features so I’ll pretend they weren’t there.

3.5 / ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The Short While is an unexpectedly emotional tale of two men who meet after swapping jackets at a party. Set to the backdrop of what remains of a post-internet sci-fi dystopic society, we follow these two men that fall in love and open up to each other only to find that vulnerability opens you up to being hurt.

Honestly, the synopsis did not prepare me for the epic that I encountered. I found the setting completely fascinating. The pencil drawings feel very artsy in a way that was initially lost on me, but I actually grew to really enjoy. Something that makes The Short While different from your typical graphic novel is the addition of narration outside of the actual graphics. Much of the storytelling is done through that text, but that’s not to say that TSW isn’t full of expressive art. The main characters, Paolo and Colin, are sweet and realistic. Flawed, scared, and multidimensional.

So while this isn’t my normal type of read, I found it quite engaging. I’ll be recommending it to a friend of mine who sells queer comics and any artsy queers who ask.

A bit of a frustrating read, since the copy of the book was low resolution - sadly, because of that, I couldn‘t really enjoy the fun illustrations. The author is - without a doubt - a very talented graphic artist, the story itself felt slightly convoluted though. Definitely an interesting idea that just wasn‘t executed to its‘ fullest potential.

Completely frustrating book, that belies its graphic novel form by infodumping a whole lot of stuff on us – about some weird hippie cult thing called The Dance, and how this future world has large free-standing gyroscope-shaped screens that showed the bad government killing people, and now show allegedly good governments killing the bad government, in daily executions – only to chunter on to no great effect about a member of a gay couple house-sitting while a new smart security system is installed. When something happens it will break out into a different form entirely, one much more prose-heavy than the standard graphic novel reader will likely appreciate or expect, but the fact that is a third of the way in will only kill off interest, as you realise the previous hundred-plus pages could have been done in ten.

Added to that is the presentation, and I don't just mean the way the text layers in my preview copy were pin-sharp while the hand-lettering was almost impossible to read at times, so blurry and low-res was the visual layer. I don't just mean the way hardly anyone is shown with their eyes open – so many conversations are of people with squinting eyes, or tiny pin-pricks of them. No, I mean the sheer dinginess and gloom on so many panels, often repeating themselves to show passage of time or subtle differences between frames, and the sheer unwillingness of the artist to allow us to see what the heck is what. Hide the awful robot things, by all means – they're pants – but don't hide the actual drama from us.

What I could get out of this is a right hodge-podge of the future world and the timelessness of gay love, of the large scale and the small and intimate, and – well, a couple of other similar extremes that just never met in any common ground marked 'entertaining'. Persistence might have brought some joy – it does have some good reviews, I see – but the fact it was so poorly produced means the book, for me, and as I saw it, is a one-starrer. Taking so long to get nowhere, and looking so ugly with it, means this is on the 'need not exist' shelf.

TLDR? – TLDR.

I really enjoyed this book and I would recommend it to everyone! I also really liked the characters!

Cartoonish in style, but literary in its work. The Short While is an inviting example of the graphic novel and the work that can be accomplished in this form.

I couldn't read any of the text due to low resolution in the Netgalley Shelf App and the small size of my screen!

I'm really bummed about this, but it was only available in the NetGalley Shelf app and the dialogue bubbles were too blurry for me to read, even when magnified.

The Short While is a graphic novel that explores the relationship between two men who start dating after an accidental swapping of their jackets at a party. Living within a dystopian world the story follows the two men's relationship as they struggle to survive and thrive in a world full of wastelands, thieves, overzealous robots, and an overbearing but ineffective government.

My feelings on this book are mixed on the one hand I feel like there would many great moments of storytelling and commentary related to surveillance, trauma, and being queer in a world that criminalizes queerness. That being said all these moments were pieced together into Frakenstein story. The story would focus on one topic/storyline before abruptly jumping to a new one without any transition or closure to the other topic. For that reason it was difficult to follow the story - it felt disjointed and I often felt like there had to be pages missing, that's how abrupt the changes seemed.

Additionally, a lot of this story was just told to the reader. In between panels would be large swaths of text that were used to explain a place or character background. The information was interesting occasionally but it often brought me out of the story because of how in-depth the paragraphs of text were. It was information that also could have been incorporated into the story through dialogue between the characters but was instead a straight-up info dump.

I rated this 1.75 stars mainly due to the potential of the book and the good moments that came through/the interesting lore Sorese wrote. Otherwise this book was just not for me from the convoluted frequently dry storytelling that seemed never-ending.

It's a cute idea for a story and some of the scenes are sweet but the review copy was really poor quality so I couldn't appreciate the art enough. I also didn't like how there were numerous typewritten captions in between the panels, like the cartoonist didn't feel bothered to letter these, or hire someone to do this, and they served as filler for plot points that weren't dealt with in the panels themselves. It made the comic feel amateurish. A nice idea for a comic but not well done unfortunately.

Two men are brought together after accidentally picking up each other's similar jackets. I've seen a few stories lately which take that as a jumping off point, using it to get anywhere from existential terror to madcap comedy, but this one felt like it was going for multiple angles at once in a way that didn't convince me. An authoritarian regime recently fell, the sort that had executions, and it's increasingly unclear whether the new boss is any better than the old boss, but people, gay guys included, still seem to be going about their daily lives unbothered; technology has changed in all sorts of ill-defined ways, yet that daily life still looks much as it did in pre-Event modernity. All of which I could perhaps have got over if I got on with the art style, but those pinched eyes and phallic noses really aren't my bag.

(Netgalley ARC)

I didn't make it that far. Very wordy for a graphic novel. More of a mixture. Also the images were blurry.

I am incredibly glad this title exists in all its sprawling, weird, genre-bending glory, and I'm glad it's being put out by a publisher as big as BOOM! That being said, I guess my days of reading and enjoying more avant-garde or classically experimental stuff are mostly over, because this title was definitely not for me. The style isn't to my taste (which is fully a me issue), and I didn't love the combination of text AND comics. Still can't wait to order it for my store when it's released, though.

DNF
I was intrigued by the cover and description, but it was nothing like what I was expecting. The genre was really not my taste and I didnt like the style. The blocks of text with illustrations made me feel confused, like I was reading an outline for what was meant to be happening. It felt unfinished

The Short While is a long comic with a lot on offer. Traditional page setups with panels and word balloons are interspersed with sections featuring blocks of text with supporting illustrations, providing two rather different reading experiences between which the reader ping-pongs. There are tantalizing bits of worldbuilding here, a future with both utopian and dystopian elements co-existing. Sorese explores the relationship between the central two lovers sensitively, but also does the same for the other relationships that helped to shape the protagonists as individuals and as partners. There are also glimpses of how technology, violence, and trauma affect human connections. The result is a touching if somewhat discursive romance with moments of great joy and great sadness. Love doesn't have to be eternal to be life-changing and meaningful.