5 out of 5

Although the story in book two is much more slight than that of book 1, it’s such an effective potboiler of tension – a literal page-turner – that it easily overcomes any narrative short-sightedness.  It’s also notable that shifting to a standalone event –  knife-wielding, masked creepo hunting our gaggle of kids – after the intriguing setup of an adult-killing plague wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does if writer Fabien Vehlmann and artist Bruno Gazzotti hadn’t so effectively captured these characters from the get-go with fully realized (and real) personalities and visual attitudes.  And instead of falling back on that familiarity to carry this brief cat-and-mouse distraction, we continue to flesh out the kids’ interrelationships as parent/child/cool uncle/crazy aunt proxies and the struggle between forced growing up and wanting to just enjoy the apocalypse for all the toy-stealin’, playin’-with-gunz fun it is.

The ‘master of knives’ is the MacGuffin in this mix, the catalyst that encourages the kids to keep moving in their trek to seeing if they can find out more, but again, it’s so tightly scripted that plot hand-waving is fine, up through the “reveal” of the enemy’s identity, which matches that same kind of short-hand-but-incredibly-effective setup.

The choreography and pacing are fantastic, and although colorist Cerise sort of goes to town on the rosy cheeks, and Gazzotti’s linework is a little sharper, when the comparative looseness of book one added a nice organic flair to the story, these changes are subsumed quickly in favor of the fluid page designs.