1 out of 5

I learned a long time ago that a writer whose work I don’t prefer matched with an artist who work I do will not produce a comic book I want to read.  Still, sometimes I’m so desperate to see said artist on an ongoing title – Ethan Nicolle in this case – that I’ll give it a go.

Appalachian Apocalypse, on new imprint Cave, did not – even pre-read – make a great impression.  Why?  Interested to see what else Cave had in store post AA, their first comic, I visited their website.  …And was still left wondering what else Cave had in store.  I know websites aren’t necessarily the premiere location for news, with facebook and twitter accounts offering feeds, but Cave’s press, and comics, prominently feature the website name, so, y’know, perhaps some effort should be made to keep that up to snuff.  That wasn’t the case at the time; it was like a portfolio for a web designer who’d only worked on that page.

Fine, but let’s not judge a comic by its website.  Alas…

Billy Tucci pitches us a Biblically motivated zombie apocalypse, which isn’t too uninteresting, but after a semi-compelling war flashback to set up some half-thought out concepts, it became clear that world- and myth-building was going to not be the specialty here.  So what else do we have?  Characters?  A crazed scientist; a survivalist ex-husband; a personality-less female scientist whose only job seemed to be to respond to the men; a.k.a. no one very interesting.  The action, or gore?  Well, here’s the curse: Ethan Nicolle, for better or worse, draws with an exagerated style that lends itself to comedy, and I don’t think that’s fully the tone AA is going for.  I think there’s some legitimate attempts at horror, and Nicolle is not the match for that.  I was reading this as a comedy (or black comedy, I guess) based on the art, but when two issues had passed without a direct joke, I went back and reread it as an attempted scare book, and it falls flat on its face.  Tucci offers no sense of escalation, and his pacing juts the same characters in tonally different scenes back to back in a jarring fashion.

Poorly constructed, not a great artist/writer fit, and poor marketing to boot.