Hinges: Paper Tigers Review

“Paper Tigers” is the second collected volume (of three) of the webcomic Hinges.

Clockwork City was an excellent introduction to Orio and the world she woke up to. There were strong characters, an interesting city readers got gradual glimpses into, and intriguing and harrowing strange happenings to build mystery and tension.

Paper Tigers shifts gears a bit, and while still quite good I didn’t find it quite as engaging. I wanted to learn more about how things worked in Clockwork City before moving on to the mysteries of what lurked outside, and a lot of this volume felt less like a compelling, unfolding mystery and more like the author was holding too much back. The general idea is fine: the readers are exploring with Orio and learning things as she does. But at this point Orio has more of a framework to work with than the reader, and the disconnect broke immersion for me a bit. I was less into the ordeal Orio was going through now and still wondering about what had come before.

That said, the larger world of Hinges does hold a lot of fascination and danger, and in the end it feels like a significant amount of progress has been made in the overarching story. Character development, particular with Orio and Bauble, continues to be the biggest strength of the series and generates genuinely emotional moments throughout this book.

As with book 1 the art is beautiful, although I found action sections a bit hard to follow this time and some of the color palates made details hard to process. Stopping to reexamine panels wondering exactly what was happening again breaks immersion and the story’s momentum.

This is a hard volume to review. I wanted more from it. Much more. But what’s here is still very good overall and makes narrative sense, with some huge reveals and developments going into the final volume.