2 out of 5

Covers 34 issues of vol.1 and 10 issues of vol. 2

It’s hard not to think of Waid’s ‘Incorruptible’ when looking at ‘Insufferable’ – Peter Krause, the ‘In…’ naming scheme, that the series each create a new world of heroes and try to flip-flop conventions via the pitch.  The BOOM! series never settled too well with me because I felt like the focus was muddled – Waid normally isn’t ‘big idea’ – he’s pretty good and sometimes great at dealing with genre comic pop, like Ruse and his current Daredevil run, but he’s normally not the guy who sells it with a tag line.  And that’s what the ‘In…’ books are.  So once the premise is set, he rallies about for different storylines to carry that premise, instead of working the opposite way (fleshing out the premise via the stories), which feels more organic to me.

The pitch for Insufferable is a father-son hero team who split at some point because, basically, the son’s a jerk.  Think Batman and Robin, and after the split, Batman stays in the shadows but Robin spins his hero life into celebrity.  The best aspect of the series is that Waid actually plays it straight – the son is a jerk, and the father is good at his job.  He plays around with making us think there might be more to that, but it’s a purposeful red herring.  And as the series goes on, you can settle into the comfort of there not being a dreaded twist at some point (‘omg the kid was playing the dad the whole time’ etc.) and try to enjoy the writing and art.  But the writing and art are somewhat mismatched.  Krause has a ‘serious’ art style that made sense for ‘Incorruptible’ – although his heavy lined dramatics are rather static to me, and his action panels lack movement – but even the tone here doesn’t work.  The dad character, Nocturnus, keeps to the shadows, and series 1 is a mystery of someone trying to turn father and son against each other, so it seems like a dark tone… but Waid’s whimsy continually pops up, and when we get to series 2, a treasure hunt in a different country, the son – Galahad – has been so depowered that the series starts to pitter patter like a sitcom.  And Krause is not the man for pulling that off.  Not that Waid helps, since he can’t seem to decide what direction to take the series in, or how dark or light, exactly, to push it, so it never really satisfies.

Still, it’s an impressive amount of work and executed professionally and free, and I was never bored, exactly, just not really wrapped up in the storyline.  The awesome thing about Thrillbent is that this is exactly the kind of thing you can just keep reading out of curiosity, only your time is required.