2 out of 5

Titan re-released this, I didn’t know it was a re-release until I saw there were already used copies floating around.  I decided to try that out before plunking down dollars on a hardcover (since I’ve been digging most of Titan’s non-property releases).  The Image version of the trade is furthermore a reprint of the four-issue which came out from Dark Horse in the early 90s, around the boom of – as Dave Gibbons points out in his intro – the grim and gloomy books that came out in the wake of Watchmen and Dark Knight.  I wouldn’t have pegged Roses as being of that era, except in that DH gave some non-heroics, non-Aliens / Predator a shot at the time, but they’ve always had a somewhat open door during their time…  So on the plus side, Roses doesn’t feel dated in any particular sense.  As its story is an alternate history, where London is essentially ruled by the Vatican and the bubonic plague has seen a recent breakout in the 20th century, victims literally walled off by ‘The London Wall,’ it could be placed in any modern-day era (excusing whatever timely political commentary was going on here of which I’m ignorant) – though the book does stamp 1990s dates on events.  However, the story is constructed in a woefully uncompelling manner, and Petrou seems to have no sense of transition or ability to stick to a narrative (at the point of the book’s publication, anyway – he makes a brief comment about this in the afterword), with lawyer Samuel Waterhouse certainly our main character but shame on you if you assume that any given monologue belongs to him.  This would be more tolerable if Petrou stuck to a particular device – show a character, then the narration boxes belong to him – but he doesn’t, so often you’ll be a few panels in and then a confusing sentence will make you have to readjust whomever was speaking in your mind.  The building mystery of disparate events – a disappeared priest, a secret brotherhood, the reappearance of the plague, rumbling of an uprising over the Priestly rule – holds promise, but the pieces are spread too far apart that when they finally start linking – in the final chapter – the resolutions feel a bit dumb, one of the core mysteries of the book explained in a throwaway sentence.  This isn’t to say that the characters or individual scenes are poorly written – this is one of the series’ strengths, actually, that the characters all come across as rather fully formed, and once you’re able to recognize the billion different scenes we jump between, the dialogue patter is handled well (thankfully rendered by seasoned letterer Ellie Deville, else it probably would’ve been a cluttered mess) – but the sequencing itself feels more filmic than comicy, and just the amount of characters to keep track of starts to feel unwieldy a few pages in.

The art by John Watkiss is confident, like a less rough Klaus Janson, and Mike McClester’s gray tones really do give the book an effectively murky mood, but at the same time, Watkiss’ is effectively line-y, and in a black and white book it makes a lot of panels incredibly difficult to read.  The trade itself is from Image’s cheaper era, so while the binding is good and the paper quality for a $12.95 pricetag, there are plenty of pages that bleed into the binding and you’ll have zero opportunity to read the words printed there unless you want to break up the glue.  There are also some editing flubs in the bios / afterwords.  It’s a tough world.

So the Titan re-release maybe, probably cleaned up the art, and perhaps Petrou had another go at correcting some of the narrative missteps.  Dunno.  Even so, unless the whole story was chopped up and rearranged to dole information out at a better pace, Ring of Roses definitely had some talent behind it, but the way it was put to use doesn’t make for the most effective reading experience.