Parallel: Special Edition

by Jason Douglas, Adam Ferris (Illustrator), Josh Sobek (Illustrator)

This special edition release of Parallel adds a brand new story and bonus content to the tale of a one-time musician discovering the chance to give his life a do-over.

The SOLD OUT twice Ringo Award Nominated story is BACK!

Landon is experiencing a quarter-life crisis. The decision he made in his early 20’s to abandon his dreams of music have resulted in a life mired in stagnation, depression, self-doubt, and a loveless marriage. When the voices start and the visions appear, Landon fears for his sanity but is nevertheless tempted and awoken to a unique possibility. A PARALLEL version of himself is offering a chance to change it all. His fate was sealed, and now his destiny awaits! What price would you be willing to pay for a second chance at the dreams you thought you left behind?

Special Edition expands upon the origins story with 50 bonus pages of exciting content, galleries, annotations, and a brand new “between the panels” 10 page story, exclusive to this edition!

120 pages, Paperback

Published May 9, 2023

Reviews

[Ronnie · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The kinds of visions, and voices you describe. We will work through all that."

Jason Douglas doesn't seem to know how commas work. He also doesn't seem to know how hyphens or quotation marks work. The writing throughout this book is extremely low quality, its editing is shoddy, and it doesn't seem to have been proofread at all. Examples:

Other Landon tells depressed Landon, "Well, for starters I don't what you whiling away your life in this chair anymore..." Don't what?

When Dr. Parikh writes depressed Landon a prescription for the antipsychotic drug risperidone (which he might or might not overdose on later), she says, "I want this filled today, and the first does taken today." The first does?

Depressed Landon tells Dr. Parikh, "The funny thing is, your right." Your! Ugh.

Stu tells depressed Landon, "He statted drinking a lot." Statted? Did no one even scan these pages before they were sent to press?

In short, Douglas has no business teaching fourth graders, and there is very little that's special about this "special edition." The art in the "bonus" panels at the back of the book is as coarse as the dialogue, and even if the main story is worthy of two stars, both the sophistic Foreword and wordy, rambling Afterword detract enough to make the whole package a one-star experience; both are typo-strewn, but Kasey Pierce's speciousness in the Foreword is especially repellant: "destiny is bullshit and fate doesn't exist," she rails (in bold). She belittles people who repost supposedly inspirational memes, saying those people "don't have an original thought anywhere in their heads," but, ironically, she has just shared how she hung a painting of Carl Jung on her bedroom wall that featured one of her favorite quotations: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." How is hanging that painting and sharing its quotation with the reading public any different from doing what she shits on the "unoriginal" people for doing online with the memes? It's like she has no self-awareness or wasn't even thinking about what she was writing. In all, those bookending sections are filled with hot air and better skipped over, but, from start to finish, the poor grammar, second-rate writing, third-rate editing, and seemingly nonexistent proofing undermine the whole effort and cumulatively do a disservice to the graphic novel medium.

First lines:
"People say that when your life is slipping away from you, that you see your entire life flash before your eyes."

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Story-4
Art-4