Author: Jonathan Hickman
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
Art work: Nick Dragotta.
Colors: Frank Martin.
Letters: Rus Wooton.
I reviewed the very first comic in this series back in September of 2013. After that I never saw or heard of the comic until I found volumes two and three in the local library (bless that library!), so I thought I’d take it up again, and see what’s what. This series apparently has now run to fourteen volumes, but after reading these two, I'm not going to be reading any more.
Volume three continues in the same disjointed and violent way in which two proceeded. Fior me there was way too much violence and gore with very little payback for it in terms of the story moving along or in terms of the quality of the story being told. I understand that these are treacherous and violent times, but I also expected better than this absed on the first volume that I read.
It felt to me like the writer had lost track of what he was doing, or that he didn't have a clear sense of where he wanted to go, and so we were left meandering in the wilderness for much of this story, which begins with a meeting of heads of state which turns into something of a blood bath.
We're introduced to some of the factions, and they all of them seemed far too stereotypical to me. There was a Republic of Texas "nation" which was tedious. Can we not be a bit more inventive than this? Given this, I was rather surprised that there was no a redneck state! The representatives of the republic were all ZZ Top impersonators. Really? I live in Texas and I've actually never seen anyone who looks like that. Even ZZ Top doesn't really look like that.
There was a black nation, whose representatives were all clones - clones who didn't get along. On the way to the meeting, one of them punched another in the face so hard that his nose was literally squashed flat, yet when we see him at the meeting not long after, his nose is perfectly fine, and all he has on it is a tiny Band-Aid. There's no bruising, no disfigurement. That was as laughable as the tired stereotypes.
Once again this is a comic book where the text was too small. In the print book it was legible, but I'd hate to try and read this in ebook form unless I had a pad with a really big screen. The text was also oddly variable. For example, during the heads of state meeting, the text oddly changed size in several speech balloons. Then it really was too small to read comfortably.
The rip-offs from other comics/movies continued in this volume. We had, for example, giant dead animal bones lying in a desert looking like they came straight from the movie Heavy Metal. We had a head sticking out of a chest, like it was from the original Total Recall movie.
In conclusion, I cannot recommend this. It really had nothing to offer and was rather tedious to read. It felt like I was reading volume two over again. There's no point in reading a comic or any other kind of book which offers nothing more than warmed-up left-overs.
