this is not very good!

i liked the first volume in a shallow entertainment sort of way… it didn’t really add up to much in terms of characters, etc. (they’re quirky! woah) but i was interested to see where the master plot was headed.

this one just kind of drove me over the line, though. the art is all gorgeous, but the obnoxious writing tics here drove me nuts, especially the dialogue. i don’t mind cleverness, but this is pretentious, clumsy bullshit that doesn’t pass muster for cleverness. and man, i am not afeared of the profanity (i adore the big lebowski), but i have never enjoyed overuse of the f-bomb less. on top of that: those dreadful monologues that open most every issue attempting to offer some deep observations (wow, thanks for educating us about the compelling drama of class struggle, immigrants and the dark secrets of america wrapped up in the convenience store there), in tangent with that the fact that the writer seems to think he’s producing something important with things to say when he’s barely capable of writing a decent thriller, and the lack of story! really that’s what killed it for me. i like spooky mythologies that slowly unravel, but that really only works if you have actual stories to tell in the meantime, here things just happen, in a spectacularly meandering fashion at that, and don’t tell me that’s life, because this book has nothing to do with life what-so-ever.