Reviews/Press
Neil Gaiman
“The New York Times” best selling author of Sandman, Neverwhere, American Gods, MirrorMask
…Grabs you from the first and keeps going…(Colleen Doran) does it with aplomb, with soul and with a sense of joy…
THE NEW YORK POST lists A DISTANT SOIL as a hot pick of the week!
…painstakingly remastered collection of Colleen Doran’s lush, sensual and complicated first Distant Soil storyline.
This stunning labor of love is about two half-alien/half-Earthling teenagers who are caught up in an intergalactic battle for freedom…It’s amazing how Doran’s work now seems right in tune with stuff like Hunger Games and the Divergent series, and yet when she was starting this series, there WEREN’T stories out there starring female characters. There weren’t epic space operas about teenage girls. She practically created the genre.
COMICS: A GLOBAL HISTORY 1968 TO THE PRESENT, Dan Mazur and Alexander Danner
…combining elements of space opera, Arthurian legend, romantic drama, and complex political maneuvering….Doran admirably bucks the fantasy genre’s tendency to make the heroic leader a seemingly indestructible warrior. ..Seren is a politically powerless but well-intentioned puppet of other actors…a volatile mix of melodramatic temper, moral righteousness, and lonely stunted child, simultaneously noble and deeply damaged.
VECTOR: THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION
…ahead of its time…Not only are the alien races reflective of the various skin colours humans have, but even within one alien race characters have different skin colours – something surprisingly rare within sequential science fiction. The book also features gay relationships without it being a big old deal.
A Distant Soil has all the right elements to be a YA SF/F phenomenon (with an enormous adult crossover audience) if comics were read as widely as prose— an unsuspecting teenage girl with a destiny and the fate of multiple worlds on her shoulders, beautiful people with superhuman abilities, a strong supporting cast of people you can root for (and—let’s be honest—ship), gorgeous costumes that beg to be cosplayed— but unlike the books that glut the YA market today, Colleen Doran did it 25 years ago and broke rules that hadn’t even been set down yet. That alone makes A Distant Soil worth reading.
Harlan Ellison
Award Winning Author of “Repent Harlequin Said the Ticktockman”, “Star Trek: The City on the Edge of Forever”, Creative Consultant for “Babylon 5”.
Recommended!
Alasdair Stewart, The Ninth Art
Colleen Doran’s science fiction saga A Distant Soil is one of comics’ most intelligent and engaging longform serials…Doran is a very artistic writer, letting the posture and expressions of her characters pass on at least as much information as the dialogue. In this way, the tremendous amount of information the reader is required to absorb is presented in an accessible and remarkably economical way.
Charles Vess
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Edition
St. Martin’s Press
World Fantasy award-winning author/artist of Sandman and Stardust
An elegantly drawn, complex cast of characters crowd through her pages and fill her multidimensional story with a complex weave of emotion and wonder.
This really is a full fledged space opera of vast proportions – the story mainly following a sibling pair who have supernatural powers and, it turns out, are illicit heirs to an intergalactic empire of unimaginable power – an empire that is built upon enslaving worlds. There are elaborate caste systems, magic, technology, and then the fantasy: from Arthurian myths to an Egyptian cat goddess. The artwork in the beginning will be very definitely set in the 1980s but don’t let that distract you – once we get to the alien ship, the drawings and set up are absolutely gorgeous.
Other ARTBOMB Reviews by Peter Rose.
Volume I reviewed HERE.
Volume III reviewed HERE.
Kat Kan Diamond Bookshelf Chair of the Graphic Novel Task Force for Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association.
Doran has created a beautifully illustrated, byzantine story, which can appeal to fans of Dune and other science fiction/fantasy epics. Using lush black and white artwork which can entice romance readers, she tells a story which reaches across the genres…
Doran weaves plot within plot in a complex and compelling pattern that leaves the reader desperately seeking the next volume. Deep social and political stories combine with rip-roaring action, romance, betrayal, passion and hate peopled with fascinatingly complex characters in an epic fantasy adventure which older teens and adults will love.
