5 out 5

Sure, post-apocalyptic big city tales are nothing new.  Heck, a good percentage of 2000 ADs stable is stuffed with ’em.  But a good percentage of these manage to be a lot of fun, if not miraculously unique at the same time, and the Rennie-droid has his name mapped to a lot of that uniqueness.

Witness: Rain Dogs, a tech-less, flooded-street New York slotted up into gang territories.  Eden – from a tech outpost somewhere beyond the city – crashes into the slurry, immediately beset upon by the most savage of savages, and only rescued by local Holly because she just sort of happens to be there and needs to escape as well.

The character templates are classic but not abused; Rennie writes them with personality but doesn’t bother stuffing in more details than his short series would allow.  The same holds true for our good guys / bad guys split: The Rainmaker is our primary antagonist, leader of some blimp-rising troupe, while Holly and Eden shack up with the Freetowners.  Rainmaker is evil, and gets an evil hard-on for the techified ‘heretic’ Eden, chasing her (and Holly) through various ganglands with their own principles and problems; the Freetowners are humorously pragmatic, favoring Eden’s destruction to maintain their own status quo.  Dialogue and backgrounds are littered with hints about how these societies work, but do we need amy excessive exposition to explain?  No, we do not.  Rennie, the ol’ pro, knows this.

There’s further five-star satisfaction to come in terms of the story’s central pursuit and conclusion.

On art duties, Colin Wilson smacks me dead with some of the most energized and yet clear panels I’ve seen in quite some time.  Prior to this I’d only really seen Wilson on more realistic titles; seeing his design for works for the homegrown machinations of the NY gangs and “feeling” all of his realized spaces makes me wish we’d had more opportunity to explore the world of Rain Dogs.

At the same time – it’s pretty fucking perfect as is, so why tempt fate?