3 out of 5

Tyson Hesse’s gag timing in his art is impeccable.  So many jokes work because visually, he has the beats down.  His vibrant, but solid backgrounds, stocked with his big, cartoonish, incredibly expressive figures also means that every page is stuffed with life; this adds to his humor because of how much nuance he can wring out of his characters’ looks and body language.  And when Diesel is busy with some pratfall-filled action sequences or trading verbal barbs, it’s a blessed delight to read.  When it’s not doing these things, it continues to look great, but the narrative is a bit too cluttered to really grab you.

There are a couple of things amiss here, with this story of floating cities and cities beneath the clouds, and Dee Diesel, lazy teen and her buddy robot Rickets – layabouts in Peacetown – who get embroiled in sudden storms and events that make the town’s name invalid: firstly, and perhaps owing to Hesse’s previous work being a webcomic, the pacing is off for an issue by issue breakdown.  Last page conclusions feel like they’re splash pages slapped in the middle of otherwise unremarkable moments.  This prevents the story from having proper crescendos, as the ebb and flow doesn’t conform to the usual comic structure.  Secondly: too much stuff happens.  This is reputedly the first part of Dee’s tale (the last panel calls it the end of “Book One”), so I can sort of imagine Tyson laying out starts and ends of several books, then figuring out how to get Dee from point A to point B.  Unfortunately, the chosen A and B for this portion requires some finagling of some large pieces, which means big events happen in each issue… and even the occurrences in the first issue could have been spread out for more time.  With as much personality as you get from the characters, it’s clear Tyson has done some world building already, so I don’t think it’s a matter of having a lack of stuff to put in.  While the excess action might sound like it makes things more exhilarating, it instead undercuts the impact of each subsequent scene, and also requires dropping a lot of details into dialogue which makes some things that are probably complicated seem a bit too simple.

Thankfully, we all love the “ne’er do well discovers their secret skills and saves the day” stories, and that’s what Diesel is gearing up to be.  Add to that the consistently fresh look and laugh-out-loud quality humor, and it’s definitely a book that gets a fair amount of leeway before it actually becomes un-fun to read.