3 out of 5

A collection of shorts from comics collective ‘The Chemistry Set.’  It’s what you’d expect from an unthemed collection of shorts – some ‘personal’ works, some surreal works, several Twilight Zone-esque twisters.  What was nice about this collection, though, is that it does feel appropriately cherry-picked – while not all the stories were exactly to my taste, none of them were hard to read, especially surprising for those ‘personal’ works, like the break-up tale ‘Grinwit’ by Andrew Grilon.  I also dug that creators hopped and jumped between the project, underlining that ‘collective’ feel versus this just being a forum for complete randomness.  We can suppose an overall shared energy that caused several of the featured creators to have ‘founding member’ listed in their short biographies could be responsible for elevating the overall quality.

‘Styx Taxi’ – a Taxi service that picks up the recently deceased and totes them anywhere within a two hour limit – with two entries in this collection by writer Steven Goldman and artist Rami Efal – warranted special notice for delivering not only a great idea for several short pieces, but showing variation between the examples in both the writing style and art.  Opener ‘The System’ by writer Tony Goins and artist Tom Williams has a great sci-fi premise of a computerized system that studies and tries to satisfy those it serves, but it squanders its ending on cuteness and confusing art.  This is really the only uneven entry though; even something cryptic like Neil Kleid and Jamesmith3’s ‘Night’s Plutonian Shore’ is satisfyingly creepy in telling its tale of retribution for irresponsible writing, and something obvious like Elizabeth Genco’s entries – a serial killer twist in ‘Red,’ drawn by Kevin Colden, and a horror revenge tale with ‘Yes, Mother’ – are well-paced and executed, even if you know, overall, where it’s going.

That ‘No Formula’ is tolerable from cover to cover makes it a notable collection in comparison to most.  It doesn’t exactly break new ground for this type of stuff, but that it’s likely to give you some new things to explore – such as, for me, ‘Styx Taxi’ – means it’s accomplished its job.