(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through Netgalley.)

When Wren was a toddler, she was found wandering the streets of New York, alone and covered in blood; an orphan, her parents missing but presumed dead. She would spend the next eighteen years haunted by the black void that was her childhood, trying and failing to piece together a "normal" life when she doesn't even know who she is.

Now a journalist, Wren tries to solve other people's mysteries as a way of salving her wounds; but always and forever on the lookout for a break in her own case. And then, it comes: in the form of a URL, which displays feeds from countless cameras. Among the pixles, static, and cavernous emptiness, it awakens something in Wren: memories long-buried, of an underground bunker, filled to bursting with cameras and monitors. And so she leaves her comfortable yet pained life with Nico, and follows an urban explorer named Joel straight into the bowels of hell.

BLINK has a pretty interesting premise, though it sadly falls short in its execution. It's pretty clearly a warning about the dangers of the surveillance state, the commodification of personal data, and the idolization of the rich (particularly tech bros), which I can get behind; but the story is just a little too out there for me. For example, take the two competing factions of Blink, the static and the signal, the latter which seemingly transformed themselves into some sort of zombie-robot hybrid of the course of, what, two decades?

The art is pretty creepy, but the dark tones and stylistic choices often make it difficult to tell what's going on. Reading this on an ipad sometimes proved maddening, as the panels rotated between landscape and portrait. I guess it's a cool choice, to mimic the protagonist's journey through a ramshackle, cyberpunk dyi, multi-unit city dwelling, but actually reading it was another story.

For a complete experience, read this body horror comic, take a break to play an aggressive duel of the boardgame Radlands, all the while listening to some grindcore, or at least a very industrial electro album... can't say I liked the experience much, but it was an original take on 1984, with a good dose of cyberpunk universe, a little American Gods twist and populated with gory techno-zombies.
Wren is a really interesting character and made me keep reading. I liked her, felt for her plight, and would have liked the tone to be a little more personal, a real voice. Something that shows, real dialogues, rather than this constant exterior commentating. It made it feel a little pretentious, and kept me at a distance from the story throughout, making it hard to really feel Wren's emotions.
If you like edgy comics, zombies, cyberpunk cults, have a look, it might be more for you.

Escaping from a childhood she largely can't remember but knows wasn't good, Wren Booker has pieced together an adult life that looks reasonably convincing – but her journalism is largely a displacement activity for the one story she can't get to the bottom of. And then, somehow, she gets a lead... Which is fairly obviously a trap, but she's sufficiently solidly characterised that her insistence on pulling the thread is still entirely plausible. More of an issue is that the answers she apparently finds, while they'd absolutely be enough of an explanation in real life, clearly won't cut it in a comic, so there has to be more, darker, stranger. And as Wren goes deeper into the mystery, that initial sense of connection dissipates. I kept being reminded of stuff I like, from House Of Leaves to Faction Paradox, but it was generally as if they'd been badly adapted into a straight-to-streaming thriller. There are some cool layouts, and occasional hints at promising ideas like an interrogation of the whole Chosen One concept, but for the most part they're smothered in so much running down corridors that even this fan of classic Who found it exhausting.

(Netgalley ARC)

Blink has an awesome premise, great art, creative use of panels, but it fails in the execution department. First, it’s not really a found footage horror. Second, the narrative is erratic, confusing, sometimes rushed, sometimes dragging. Urban exploration turns into a heavy-handed lesson about the evils of surveillance and social experiments.

Sadly, Blink didn’t work out for me at all.

What I really enjoyed about this story was the mystery. Wren can’t remember her childhood. She was found alone on the streets of New York covered in blood. As an adult the blankness of her past haunts her and she searches the web seeking for the truth. Then one day she finds something on the internet and she decides to follow the trail.

This is a tense filled dark horror/ sci-fi graphic novel. The artwork complements the story and the pace is good. The story is a little open ended but the questions the reader is left, with actually heighten the end.

It is a good story with plenty of twists, and turns.

Copy provided by Oni Press via Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

Blink is a chilling and fast paced look at how society jumped head first into the need to be immersed in media. We follow Wren as she relives the trauma of her young life in well timed flashbacks of memories in a building that seems all too familiar. Blink serves as a modern day parable about how media will live forever and what we do with this digital immortality could be our undoing.

The art style is well suited to the story telling and helps lend to the eerie atmosphere of Blink. The layout kept the story moving without becoming disorienting and was used in clever ways to amplify the found footage angle of the story.

Thank you to Netgalley and Oni Press for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This was one hell of a ride! Blink follows Wren who tries to find out where she comes from and what happened to her parents. She has no recollection of her past and all she has are flashes — blinks — of a strange place. She is sent an online video of something that triggers her memory, finds the house where she comes from, and then she finds out what really happened to her and her family. It’s strange, weird and very out there in its concept.

It’s science fiction when it’s best, in my opinion, as it takes a normal enough concept and makes it strange and eerie — we don’t really know what happened, we just know what has happened to the place afterwards. There are weird flashes of what has become of people (see: creepy body modifications) and it’s very cultish.

The art was really great and really encapsulated the universe. It was strange, vibrant and techy, which worked really well for the graphic novel. I think it’s definitely worth reading if you want pretty art and a strange science fiction / cult / supernatural story.

I know most reviews have said they didn’t really get the plot, but I also don’t really think it’s necessarily one you HAVE to get to like the graphic novel. It’s like life, sometimes you don’t really get to know everything except the moment you find yourself in, and it makes sense not all is revealed to Wren (or the reader). It’s also got a relatively open ending, so I’m hoping there’ll be more coming out!

Thank you to NetGalley and Oni Press for the ARC!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this graphic novel. The artwork within this graphic novel is absolutely stunning. The use of space on the page and non-traditional layouts really was engaging and added to the overall feel of the story. That being said, I didn't really understand the plot of the story. There seemed to be little build-up or development, and things happened so suddenly and then were moved on from. It didn't always feel cohesive. By the end I didn't really know what had happened or what was going on, nor did I care. The artwork was by far the best part of the story.

A spooky and scary book. The art is vibrant and exciting and really draws you in.
The story is engaging and kept me hooked throughout.
A really great piece of art!

Ok, so... the artwork for this comic was good. REALLY good. Exceptional even. But the plot? I'm... not quite sure what happened. I don't get how none of this could have come to light earlier, and I don't understand what the POINT was. I guess it just wasn't for me.

Thank you Netgalley for the arc. I was excited to read this as I'm a big fan of Sebela's series Crowded (which I loved!). This was the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Very dark, mysterious, and honestly confusing. I wasn't entirely sure what was happening for the entire middle part of the story. Maybe I'm missing something or this just went over my head. The premise was so intriguing, the art was amazing, and the narrative was interesting, but I wish I understood what transpired more. I do like Selbela's interrogation of technology as a theme in his work but this was a tiny bit too muddled for me.

I really loved the art style of this graphic novel. The cover itself is beautiful. The layout of the comic strips themselves had a very interesting composition. Unlike any I've seen before. It work for some pages but for others it made it a little difficult to follow which way the story flows (this may just be me though). Overall an enjoyable read, and I will keep a look out for more of the artists other work!

Blink is the newest cult graphic novel that you must read! AHHH This was such a great story. In a society that continues to add more and more technology and the fear of being watched through that technology mounts, this story comes at such a great time.

Blink follows the story of Booker who appeared mysteriously on the streets of NYC with no memory of where she came from. When she receives a link to CCT footage of somewhere that seems familiar, this story starts truly racing and building to a terrifying conclusion. This graphic novel starts off a little slow, but the pay-off is so worth it. You aren't going to see what is coming until the very last page.

PS - This is great for fans of Dirtbag Rapture!

I wasn't the biggest fan of this one.
The art style wasn't my favourite but I liked it well enough. Same for the story, it was ok but it sometimes felt disjointed. A lot of things could've benefited from explanations and backstories, I ended up not knowing exactly what was happening.
The layout of the pages sometimes made it difficult to follow along, as by the time I was halfway through a page I realised I was reading in the wrong order.
I gave it three stars because I didn't hate it, but it was only OK.

In the mid-90s, dot-com millionaire Josh Harris created an art project called Quiet: We Live in Public, in which he took over 100 people and enclosed them in an underground bunker in which their every need and want would be satisfied, but they would have to give up their privacy and consent to being filmed at all times.

Blink was clearly heavily inspired by this, but, without any spoilers, taken very much to the extreme. The concept of constantly being watched and how people can be affected and transformed by this is a very interesting one, and I do think that the real-world and psychological implications of this could have been explored more. The comic focused more on the sci-fi(?) elements, which were very cool but weren’t really explained in as much depth as I would have liked. I would have liked a little more focus on how Blink the social experiment became Blink the sci-fi horror nightmare mansion.

The art is fantastic and I especially liked the panelling - I love seeing panels in comics pushed beyond the standard polygons and how fluid panels can help move the story forward.

I requested this book because I loved Christopher Sebela’s trilogy Crowded, and while this had a completely different kind of tone and style, it was a similarly interesting take on technology and the near future (though I must admit that I enjoyed Crowded a bit more).

(3.5 stars rounded up to four mostly for the phenomenal art)

Thank you to Netgalley and Oni Press for an advance review copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

An ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS graphic novel! The text and line work are impeccable. The layouts are imaginative and the textured design on every page is phenomenal. This however, did not translate well to ebooks (luckily my PDF reader allowed page spread reading), but would look beautiful as a book for

The promise of a cyberpunk sort of found footage story peaked my interest, but ultimately the payoff was a bit of let down. The confusion and hysteria amps up to 11 as soon as she dives underground with the story and the imagery moving at breakneck speed through a myriad of page layouts and hundreds of text boxes. I felt the story is broken up into three big exposition dumps which hindered the action and made the complex subject matter a bit difficult to follow. Also, the word to visual ratio is heavily weighted towards text making it difficult to appreciate the impeccable layout design.

Is it an origin story about the new gods? A parable about technology? A Matrix-chosen-one cyberpunk future? It all blends in together, never quite gelling for me.

Thank you to Oni Press for the opportunity to read and rate and review this arc which comes out May 16,2023.

This is a found footage horror book: I know crazy concept for a book. I thought it wouldn’t translate well to book form but it surprised me. Wren Booker was 3 when she was found alone and bloody on the streets of NYC. Since that day she couldn’t remember Jack squat until she finds this website that streams multiple CCT feeds from an abandoned building. So what does Wren do? She goes and investigates. From there the book is off running. I enjoyed it.

Blink starts with a mistery that keeps the reader invested in the story. What's the deal with Wren Booker's past? Why was she found wandering the streets alone and covered in blood as a kid, and why doesn't she remember anything? What happened to her parents?

The highlight of this comic is the art style and the unusual and clever layout of the pages, which matches the action very well. It can be confusing, however, as sometimes it's not clear where to start reading the dialogues and what direction to follow - even experienced readers might have trouble with that. As for the story, it's ok. The explanations are quite far-fetched and obscure, and the resolution is a bit of a letdown. I think I had high expectations for this comic and it didn't live up to them. But it's an enjoyable read for horror/sci-fi fans, though probably not very memorable in the long term.

Confusing but beautiful in a fascinating way. I think this would be a lot better in book-form, as some 2page spreads didn’t translate properly to an ebook.

Dark, cultish, and circular. I love a story that tells itself into a circle. Haunting.

Thanks to NetGalley for this advanced copy of the ebook!