1 out of 5

Wow, what an inept preview.  Unfairly because the product looks pretty crappy, but also because it fails on all levels to interest me in the previewed books.

Also, Double Take is a subsidiary of video game company Take-Two Interactive, according to the indicia stuff, which I didn’t know.  Inconsequential to this review, but weird.

Genesis is apparently a shared universe comicy thing, a la Valiant, tightly knit connections and all, and is dropping 10 issues on us at once, masterminded by Bill Jemas.  The shared universe’s sharing concept is… zombies.  Specifically Night of the Living Dead.  And I only know this because of Comic Shop News, because this bullshit preview gives you absolutely no fucking indication of that… and my slipping into coarse language there should be telling (I guess, if you know me WHICH YOU DO, DAD) as to how frustratingly stupid this freebie is.  It gives you one page that shows a preview of the covers of one of the universe’s series, which admittedly are nifty enough, the creator credits, and a one-liner tagline, like “Doctors, and nurses, and zombies, oh my!”, pushing past the commentary of NotLD and apparently aiming for the camp and nudity horror crowd.  And this is fine, I guess, if the matching art page had any goddamn context or serviced the tagline whatsoever.  Or even if the pages were interesting in and of themselves, which they negative 100% are not.  It also doesn’t help that, frankly, every single artist looks pretty amateurish, and rather ugly production leads to webcomic-lookin’ lettering and flat, digital colors.

There’s some odd world-building stuff in the preview, like an ad for era-appropriate electronics and a map that shows the locations where all the books take place, but… did I mention the book explains nothing about Genesis, or why ten issues are being released?

God, it’s difficult to frustrate me when your price is $0, but this thing is so ineffective it’s insane.  And it comes from someone with definite industry experience…  So maybe there’s something conceptually here that Jemas gets that I don’t and this will sell like the cakes that are hot, and I’ll feel like poo for recycling this preview when its value shoots up to ten bamillion willion wollars.  Cheers, motherfuckers!