2 out of 5

A comic book structural tale as old as time, or at least as old as standalone miniseries have been around: an excellent, intriguing first issue establishes tempo, tone, and provides a lot of rich ideas… that subsequent issues in the series successfully squander. I’m not surprised when this happens – and I’ll always try to remember to add the caveat that comics are hard; and it’s not like I have a book to my name to show someone the “right” way to do this stuff – but I have been reading and critiquing long enough to be impressed when a series can sneak past my radar for sussing out “hook books” up front. To writer Shobo’s credit, I don’t think Buckhead is a hook book; and its intrigue extends at least partly into its second issue, but as soon as the curtain drops on “what’s going on,” it reads more like the writer just didn’t have the beats as clearly mapped out – the latter 2/3rds or so of the run have an almost improvised vibe to them, centered around hitting a few keys marks and hoping the rest falls into place. George Kambadais’ art is complicit: I dig the kind of Frazier Irving angles and flat colors and a kind of INJ Culbard simplicity, but little mismatches between dialogue and imagery that are present early on grow into frustrating discrepancies as Shobo’s script becomes (from my interpretation) looser; and in general, the visual geography of the book is somewhat non-existent – I think the intended scale of later sequences was not a good fit for George’s style.

Toba has just moved to Buckhead, in support of his mother’s work as a scientist. Struggling through a bit of an anti-authority streak, Toba manages to pick up a group of friends his first day at school, and they follow some rumors to a discovery in the school’s basement: a secret video game that… somehow ties into Toba’s past. This is one oddity of many, actually, including an invisible-to-everyone-but-Toba girl in the neighborhood, black-hatted individuals constantly in the background, and some matching tattoos shared by the townsfolk that they tend to collectively brush off as odd birthmarks.

This is all a bit silly and scattered, but initially that feels by design: tossing Toba (and the reader) into a kind of classic Gravity Falls-esque formula of the strange town with secrets, and swirling it with modernized conspiracy theory vibes and online culture. Like the amount of weirdness isn’t Shobo trailing out plot threads that won’t pay off, but rather going all in on Buckhead as a completely “other” place of unknown technology and supernatural events and so on. It’s intriguing!

…And then it’s suddenly a mess. The “design” is incidental to Shobo wanting to hit those aforementioned marks, which are closer together in the first issue or so, but require a lot of downtime between them as the book goes on. In that downtime, the book starts trading in lazier YA character tropes that don’t have a strong precedent – characters talking / acting a certain way to fulfill archetypes all of a sudden, because now this is a team book and not about Toba – and leaps for action sequences that probably wouldn’t have been necessary if the mystery of the town’s weirdnesses had been given more patience. I do think the way some Nigerian mythology / tradition is mixed in is really effective, giving us enough background to engage a curious person to Find Out More without it diverting the story to walls of history-lesson text; I just wish that the majority of the series had felt more purposeful overall – the folklore ultimately becomes just another drop in the mixed up plot bucket, where so much is happening that isn’t really necessary that you stop feeling much connection to it.