Rating: WARTY!
X'ed Out (not to be confused with X'Ed Out Part II by Kevin Lofton, or with The X'ed-out X-ray by Ron Roy and John Steven Gurney) is book one of a trilogy (X'ed Out, The Hive, and Sugar Skull. As usual for me, I came into this ass-backwards and read the last one first, couldn't get the middle one at the library, and read the first one last, so my take on it is a bit skewed (but when isn't it?!). The problem with graphic novels (and also with some non-graphic series) is that they offer no help whatsoever in determining which volume goes where. There was no indication on either of the two volumes that I did read to offer guidance that it was even a part of a trilogy, much less where each appeared in the order. I had actually thought these were two different stories based int eh same world. Wrong.
Doug is delusional. Seriously so. he has a fantasy world running in his head that is very nearly as real to him as is the real world. He wakes up one night to find a hole in his wall and his dead black cat leading him off to a fantasy worlds inhabited by his alter ego, a Tintin rip-off named Nitnit. It gets worse from there, with Doug reliving his past, meeting hostile lizard men who are conducting a breeding program using human females (how that works is a complete mystery).
Doug is quite evidently misogynistic, and also a spineless loser who is so self-obsessed and indolent that no one could possibly love him. he blows one chance after another to do something with his life. I didn't like this story (so-called) at all. It made a vague kind of sense, but overall, for all practical purposes was too overblown to make an real sense, and there's too much going on to ever get resolved even in three volumes. The artwork was colorful and, well, it was colorful. It was also flat, inanimate, and unappealing. I can't recommend this, and had no interest in going on to read the middle volume.
