3 out of 5

Covers issues 1 and 2

Okay, not fair, I didn’t read the whole series… but I couldn’t do it.  I suspected I was going to give up after issue 1, since that was a bit of a chore, but the art was so delicious that I wanted to give it another go… and no.

So there’s a dude named James Stokoe who has worked on a couple series – Wonton Soup, Orc Stain – and while the narratives are questionably wandering, the narratives in combination with the art, which is this surreal, uber-detailed madness landscape of ooky Dave Cooperesque bumpy, sweaty characters (but less phallic, more vagina-y, generally) and creativity, grounded by a sense of consistency such that the weird characters seem at home in the weird landscape.

Brandon Graham has been kicking around for a while, but only came to my notice with an excellent short in a recent Dark Horse Presents – The Speaker – which was a surrealist tale that bounced around between making its point too obviously and just perfectly, but ended in a great spot to keep it a totes awesome work with wickedly appealing artwork… that reminded me of Stokoe, the sound-effects-in-balloons method, the freehand style, the wacky paneling and detailed landscapes that seemed created wholesale in the author’s mind…

When Warheads popped up on the shelf, I couldn’t remember Graham’s name, but the style seemed to match The Speaker, and I was happy to find out that, yes, it’s the same person.  But what I was reading was fucking incomprehensible.  It’s the same gorgeously detailed art but blown out to insane proportions, every little thing bearing a detail that I can’t tell if I’m supposed to care bout or not.  It’s visual overload.  It’s impressive, but it, unfortunately, confuses the narrative.  The paneling style that worked so well in his short piece, moving the eye around the page effectively, just serves to zoom me randomly around in Warheads.  Am I supposed to be reading it in this order?  Do these words matter?  And it takes me way out of the story, which is unfortunate, because there are / seems to be some interesting elements being built around an assassin and a traveling couple… though, by the same token, those elements are rendered stupid by pacing that stops and starts and jumps around.  There have been previous Multiple Warheads bits, and another collection of stories under the “King City” moniker that look similar, so perhaps there’s a learning curve I’m just not getting.  Anything’s possible.

Unfortunately, I won’t be giving it a chance.  Still, Mr. Graham is awarded a mediocre rating from this half-assed reviewer because of the artistry and bananas creativity involved.  The story might very well be great, but I can only weigh in on the dialogue I can pick out, which reeks of a made-up language with not enough visual cues to the reader as to what’s what (which Stokoe was great at in Wonton and Orc Stain… jes sayin’…), so again, learning curve, but… uh… ellipses… and… Stokoe…