3 out of 5

Flawed, but really impressively ambitious.

It’s tempting to start rattling off comparisons for analysis: a character named Enigma with questionable origins reminds of the Peter Milligan samely titled book; the grizzled superhero retrospective brings forth inevitable Watchmen thoughts, but maybe just a general Moore deconstruction approach; violin playing / suit wearing villains visually recall Umbrella Academy; the self-awareness of the book has a Morrison vibe…

You get the company Jakob Free perhaps keeps.  But such comparisons are a disservice because unlike, say, Gerard Way’s shitty Doom Patrol, or the million and ten Watchmen iterators who miss the point, this isn’t a flailing attempt at inspiration that covers up imitation: Free’s work is his own.  And it’s littered with its own hints and concepts, from the Janus company for which our lead, Tommy Centro works, to the use of the term ‘centroversal’ for a partial chapter title (no worries, gang, I had to look it up via wiki: centroversion, a psychological term for the duality of extroversion and introversion), and thus also possesses its own genius… and failings.

One of which, in the latter case, is, unfortunately, the use of a different artist for each of its five chapters.  While I can see the argument that the varying styles are representative of the theme at the book’s core, Free already stuffs the 120ish pages with a lot of characters and settings to sift through – the pacing being somewhat hiccupy as a result – and so having to piece together some drastically different character models is disruptive, particularly with the concluding final chapter, which is drawn much looser than those that precede it, and maybe too loosely to properly visualize some complicated ideas.  Along these lines, and as just indicated, the story veers all over the place, or so it seems.  I read it twice, back to back (which is a good sign, actually, that I was fascinated enough to do so), and once you have an expectation of how things are formed, the pacing makes a lot more sense, but initially, jumping from Tommy’s dreams of hero The Roman battling the Enigma to Vietnam superheros to relationship flashbacks / montages to snippets of the detectives investigating present day murders attributed to Enigma is… somewhat jarring.

Ambitious.  And never uninteresting.  You can sense potential rippling through this thing, and it does come together, if a bit forced by the meta-textual approach to the story’s conclusion.  My first readthrough was page-turningly gripping: you sort of figure what’s going on easily enough, but its curious to figure how it will spiral to a conclusion, and exciting as it does so.  My second readthrough was slower, and more paced, but equally enjoyable, to the point of appreciating the flaws I’ve mentioned as part of an inspired creative process.

I hope Mr. Free has more comics for us in the future.