Book log 2018 #4 - Near Death vol. 1
Feb. 11th, 2018 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lonemagpie#4- NEAR DEATH VOL. 1 by Jay Faerber and Simone Guglielmini.
The first five issues of the crime comics series about a hitman who tries becoming a saviour after a near-death experience in which he visits Hell and is confronted by victims...
The art is decent, and sufficiently gritty in style, and the story works as a self-contained graphic novel (though there's a second half, Volume 2, as there were 11 issues altogether), with the first three chapters being pretty self-contained themselves also. They all have pretty strong opening hooks too.
The problem I had with it is that the protagonist's motivation for change... the Hell bit isn't that bad-looking, it's over too quickly, and it just doesn't strike me that he'd go “chance to redeem, OK” so completely so instantly, as a convenience to get the story going. Yeah, they probably wanted to avoid the whole A Christmas Carol performance, but since the guy's a sociopath I can't help thinking that telling his motivation in flashback would have worked better.
But it was OK overall, once past that opening element. The volume also includes a script and pencils for issue 1, but not all the other extras that were in apparently in the original issues. Still, I would get Vol. 2 if I come across it, and it did read nice enough as a crime-thriller graphic novel.
The first five issues of the crime comics series about a hitman who tries becoming a saviour after a near-death experience in which he visits Hell and is confronted by victims...
The art is decent, and sufficiently gritty in style, and the story works as a self-contained graphic novel (though there's a second half, Volume 2, as there were 11 issues altogether), with the first three chapters being pretty self-contained themselves also. They all have pretty strong opening hooks too.
The problem I had with it is that the protagonist's motivation for change... the Hell bit isn't that bad-looking, it's over too quickly, and it just doesn't strike me that he'd go “chance to redeem, OK” so completely so instantly, as a convenience to get the story going. Yeah, they probably wanted to avoid the whole A Christmas Carol performance, but since the guy's a sociopath I can't help thinking that telling his motivation in flashback would have worked better.
But it was OK overall, once past that opening element. The volume also includes a script and pencils for issue 1, but not all the other extras that were in apparently in the original issues. Still, I would get Vol. 2 if I come across it, and it did read nice enough as a crime-thriller graphic novel.