The Spider: "Scavengers of the Slaughtered Sacrifices"

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful art, lousy story
Review: Oh, lordy, where to start? I know: the good. Gene Colan is still a master. This book features beautiful black and white art by Mr. Colan. Quite nice stuff. The packaging is quite nicely designed. Quality crafting there. Now, the bad: This is absolutely one of the worst written graphic novels I've read in many a moon. Why? Because the writer, Don McGregor, is usually a man I trust. I bought this thing with no reservations, thinking that there was no way that this team could disappoint me. McGregor (who does get a little verbose even in his good stuff) really needed an iron-fisted editor here. The preaching tone of the dialogue (censorship is evil!) is the primary problem. The parodies of pop-culture figures are amusing for a while but get tiresome. This book reads like someone's parody of bad fan fiction. The format keeps bouncing back and forth between the traditional comic style (captions/word ballons) to more of an illustrated novel style. This concept can work when properly executed, but it sure didn't here.

It's rare that I get this worked up over a disappointing comic, but considering that I lost [$$] and much of my time on this thing, I have a right to gripe. I want my money back!! Actually, I want Don and Gene to try this again and do it right!