2 out of 5

Appealing blocky art style, and I get that it’s translated, but the book is a mess.

Supposedly it’s a crime-thriller… but what the duff is the crime?  Where is the thrill?  A series of strange events do not a plot make.  Although the reading passes by quickly and pleasantly, because Ghermandi’s art is kookily appealing, stitching together a story out of the very disconnected events seems pointless.  The descriptions I read elsewhere make it seem like that oddness is supposed to make me want to decipher the what and the why, but it’s just too oblique, there’s not even enough of a core story that makes it worth sifting out the details.  I have some surreal stuff in my collection – Sammy the Mouse (Zak Sally) comes to mind – that works if you want it to, and still works if you don’t want it to, because it gives you some consistency to keep you sane.  I’d say something like Ed the Happy Clown (Chester Brown) follows this kind of thread as well.  But Grenuord feels more in the vein of something I tried a couple of issues of recently – Multiple Warheads – a book that is dense and obviously, to the creator, follows an internal logic, but is just too much of a mess to work for me as a reader.  I like the pictures though.

So there’s something to Francesca Ghermandi’s madness – I mean, the book works as a series of surreal and odd images, and you read the panels because you sense the elements of plotting just beyond the page.  It doesn’t feel sloppy – it’s definitely purposeful, so that’s something.  I just can’t really tell you (and as this short review is testament, can’t be bothered to tell you) what that something amounts to.