1 out of 5

…And with each flipped page, I kept wondering: how much longer can this travesty possibly go on?  Answer: interminably.  Except with more swearing.

On the cover, or at least the groovy James Stokoe version, the giant spider attacking the giant crocodile might give you some hope.  And at the close of this over-sized issue, as writer Christophe Bec incompetently non-sequences “building” scenes of people discussing big critters in the sewers of the future, when the clunky pieces of the 6 or 7 piece puzzle (with shiny pieces!) are farted into “place,” there’s the stirrings of possibility that issue 2 will deliver on some kind of pulp monster battle.

Of course this has to set aside the horrible, uninvolving, cliched, Michael Bay-fuckterpiece of the scripting, which takes a haunted-by-the-death-of-his-partner trope, and the strong-and-intelligent-because-she’s-a-scientist female character – pausing to strips her down to her skivvies at one point, and make a ooh-smart comment about how she doesn’t have time to wear makeup – and tosses them together on some poorly defined sewer search squad for some cryptids, then unnecessarily shoves in a political conspiracy kill squad and, I dunno, some kind of commentary about social classes.  All of this is competently Euro-arted by Stefano Raffaele, which is an ignorant way of describing his detailed but rather unmotivated bread-and-butter style.  And yet, despite this glowing praise, reading it is a goddamn snore; a special form of torture committed upon oneself that can’t be blamed on a poor translation or some other derailing factor.

Nope.  ‘Tis just bad comics.