Author: Alea Kott (no website)
Publisher: Diamond Book Distributors
Rating: WARTY!Image Comics
Illustrated by:
Michael Walsh
Tradd Moore
Mateus Santoluoco
Morgan Jeske
Will Tempest
Colorist: Jordi Bellaire
Letterist: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller
Set in the near future (with some flashbacks), this is a graphic novel of terrorism and sci-fi, aimed at the adult market, and it relates a story of an unspecified bio-device (the SAP-V enhancer) which somehow augments a person's fighting skills. It relates a story of a portal which allows instant transportation from one location to another. It also relates a story of unrelenting violence; the comic is very bloody and doesn't spare gore or nudity. The artwork is acceptable, certainly better than I could do, but it did not impress me as much as other novels have, especially not given how seemingly perfunctory and unnecessarily gory it was. The comic had a dirty feel, and I am sure this was intentional, but it fell flat for me. I was impressed by how consistent the art was, given the number of illustrators who worked on this project. Having said that, some pages seemed more appealing than others. I found myself taken much more by the larger illustrations than the busier, smaller ones.
The book seemed quite experimental in some regards. There were rather oddball images putting in seemingly random appearances throughout the narrative, or there were regular images, but oddly skewed (such as the credits page, for example, and one partition page upon which the text was unaccountably vertical. I saw little point in these, and those experiments didn't worked for me. Obviously the whole point of a graphic novel is to throw a wrench into the orderliness of endlessly rolling lines of rank and file text, taking it off-road and into the wilds, but there's a limit to how much I'm willing to rough-it when I'm reading! The text was odd, too, with some pages consisting of the traditional image-plus-description-or-speech, while others were completely devoid of all text, like the sixteen page sequence starting on page 102. That sixteen page spread seemed a bit overdone; it wasn't the only one but it was by far the most extravagant. In contrast, there was a surprising amount of pure text - memos and interrogation/debriefing reports for example - and at least one of these was almost illegible (page 61). I don’t know if this was intentional.
Another issue that I had was that the story reminded me of a squirrel, jumping almost spastically from one thing to another with no segue in between. This made it hard to get into the story and to follow developments, and even to figure out what was going on. In the end, I had no idea what was going on or even what was supposed to be going on. I have no idea, even having finished the comic, what the story was that I had just been told, or how the various selections were supposed to be related to one another! There's an important difference between infusing some mystery and intrigue into a novel, and simply leaving your reader in the dark, especially by the time they reach the end. The big reveal was what? I have no idea! Maybe it’s just me, but it didn’t work for me and I cannot recommend this graphic novel.
