This book is just so bad in so many ways. On to the not so secret show...

The Thief of Always is fine for what it is: a kiddie morality tale. Artwork good. It just won't interest anyone over about 12 years old. Three stars.

The Great and Secret Show. A stinker. Maybe two stars. The bulk of the contents of this book. Artwork is good. I have never read the novel but if it is anything like this it is bad, bad, bad. Its hard to know where to start. Two dimensional characters. You maybe care about Tesla by the end, but more than likely just because she is cute. I wanted the rest to die, die, die a horrible lingering, unending death.

Too many plot lines that go nowhere and are not even peripheral, much less central, to moving the story along. If Barker knows where he's going, he has no idea how to get there. It reads like a soap opera and is paced like one. Almost seemed like padding to make the book seem deeper, superficially more complicated, and more profound (as if complexity and length equaled profundity).

Waaaaay too much narration; always seeming to need to explain what is going on.

Another goofy pointless Barker mythos. He seems to be obsessed with creating these silly superficially profound universes that just seem like a jumble of stuff thrown in: quiditty, iad, uoroboros, the art, the sea, the nothing, the something, and on and on. Nobody cares about this stuff. It is not good story telling unless there is a point to it. I think Barker became obsessed with this idea after Hellbound Heart, where he did create an effective weird framework for a parallel universe, but only because it was central to the idea of the plot and themes of heaven/hell, pain/pleasure, mortality/immortality, gods/demons. Here, as in other Barker fiction, it is just thrown out for its own sake with no clear idea as to why it was created.

Bad dialog. I know graphic novels are not Shakespeare, but the dialog is just ludicrous here. Again, I don't know the novel but I felt robbed of Barker's usual wonderful prose. Graphic novels can have good prose, the Sandman is a good example.

Seduth: four stars. Nice snappy tight weird creepy profound story. No babbling, no irrelevant plot lines or characters. Great artwork. About 1/10 of the contents of this book.

This Omnibus is best ignored or borrow it from a library if you absolutely have to. ( )

Meh, too much left out, much better in the original written form. Pretty, though... ( )