2 out of 5

It’s interesting that Kurtis Wiebe does the foreword for this collection of a Monkeybrain webseries, as ‘Headspace’ shares some thematic and plotting similarities with Wiebe’s Green Wake.  Of course, this is latter day, it’s-all-about-my-kids Wiebe, so perhaps I should’ve expected the series to be as overwrought as it is.  While it might share (initially) the metaphorical setting of Wake – which was written during the era of Wiebe I enjoy – as well as its using that setting to study an emotion, ‘Headspace’ shares none of that books graceful mystery or sense of depth.  Instead, its an over-written jumble of narration that doesn’t establish its premise or lead well enough before vaulting us into its dealings with good and evil.  In other words: we don’t care too much about the decision the ‘sheriff’ of Carpenter Cove – Shane – has to make by book’s end, and as that’s what everything is leading up to, that makes the journey something of a failure.  Which is unfortunate, because despite the book’s similarities to GW, or perhaps other series / GNs / Matrixes with similar concepts, ‘Headspace’ certainly has promise: Cove being a ‘government project’ implanted in assassin / killer Max Johnson’s brain in order to… something something mine secrets, and “staffed” with subjects (asleep in the real world, awake in Max’s mind) whose jobs it is to keep things running in a somewhat orderly manner.  Setups of this nature can be fun mysteries, but that’s where Lindsay sabotages his book: he skips over the mystery almost entirely.  We get a couple opening pages of Shane questioning the nature of Carpenter Cove before the world starts to crumble (Max, in the real world, has broken free of his programming), and while this could still be a fun way to play with our expectations and explore a world, any spoilers that I leaked in the above sentences are dribbled out without much suspense soon enough; the shake-up is enough for Shane to give us the gist, and that gist is mixed up in an excess of overwrought words.

Now the thought might’ve been to skip over all of this setup precisely because it had been done before, thereby allowing Lindsay to focus more on his psychological pursuits, but ripping out the setup never establishes Shane, and never establishes his world, and thus, as mentioned, never gives us the grounding to care about those pursuits.

It is a project of passion, though, and Eric Zawadzki’s and Sebastian Piriz’s art makes things easy to read, despite it (and the colors applied by Zawadzki, Marissa Louise and Dee Cunniffe) not really being too defined of a style – a touch of Brian Hurtt, a touch of Brian Churilla – and the tone is consistent, which suggests things played out according to plan.  So my usual caveat: I might not’ve liked it, but I can appreciate the effort put forth.