3 out of 5

It’s been proven countless times, but let’s underline it again: comic books – good comic books – are a meeting of both art _and_ story.  Once can prop up the other, but when you read something that truly satisfies, it almost always guarantees that you’ve been able to appreciate both pieces of that puzzle, consciously or not.  And maybe you’re the type that doesn’t care for pesky words, in which case you created the dark era of 90s comics, so thanks for that; if you’re the type that doesn’t care for _images_, then really, why are you trying to read comics?  So again: art and story.

Monster Attack Network – the (I believe) first comic work by creators Mark Bernardin and Adam Freeman – is a pretty entertaining piece of comic pop.  It shows its newbie creator roots, but there’s an absolute momentum and undercurrent of intelligence to the writing that it helps you to move past that.  More impressive – though this is an unfortunate compliment – is that the writing survives the, at times, complete failure of the art.  But it’s only half a puzzle in that state.  I can wrack my imagination on how the other half might fit, but the puzzle never really gets completed that way.  Extended metaphor working for you?  Okay.

M.A.N. is what it is: an agency that handles monster attacks on the island of Lapuatu.  What’s not so clear from the narrative is that MAN isn’t there in the capacity we’d generally assume – to destroy the beasties – but rather to assist with recovery and protection from their actions.  To this extent there’s a whole bunch of cool stuff Bernardin and Freeman just toss casually into the text, like fun world-building easter eggs: escape tunnels and chutes and safety belts the population should be wearing.  This _idea_ and those little details are all part of the momentum, the B-movie fandom that’s certainly fueled this project, and pretty much allowed things like character to take a back seat to a constant stream of near misses and escapes.  Which would normally be a critcism, but the way MAN is stitched together, it works in its favor, taking hero and damsel stereotypes and having them chew gun and one-liner but be somewhat against type as well: the girl who notes every casual harassment comment; the manly lead who sorta would rather play by the rules and be left alone.  No, we’re not really invested in whether they live or die, but that these characters exist as slightly 3-dimensional, palette swapped shades of their normal tropes gives the story just the right kind of flavor to up the Fun content.  Of course, a _slightly_ more evolved story, or a bad guy plan that made one iota of sense (or, oppositely, was cheesed up a bit more to make its ridiculousness stand out), or one or two lines of context could have helped, and maybe “forced” some clarity that the art didn’t provide.

Which isn’t to say the art is horrible, it’s just not up to the requirements of the BIG monster conceit.  Or the action.  Nima Sorat’s loose, way stylized style – like a mix of Michael Oeming’s blocky characters with Dean Haspiel’s exagerrated action and Paul Pope’s hazy inking – contributes no sense of layering (fore-, mid-, background), with visual indicators of what you’re looking at completely lost in a mess of swirly lines, made even more indecipherable by the black and white.  When things are at a relative stand still, Sorat’s stuff looks good, and matches the pokey vibe of this whole thing.  But things are _rarely_ at a stand still.  At the very least, the art has the same type of energy as the writing, even if it amounted to what looks like scribbles.

So it’s a Hook Book – a story written based on a cool idea and not much else – but our writers dug into their concept just enough to make it an exciting and humorous read.  Alas, humbled by confusing artwork, it’s not a book you necessarily want to pick up and _re-read_, but it certainly leaves you with the sense that people had fun making it, and that’s infectious enough.