4 out of 5

So that’s cool, I like preview books.  In fact, I sort of love them, and I don’t understand why we don’t get these kinds of freebies stuffed in our bags at least once a month.  When they’re done right, that is, which this DEFY preview is.  When these types of books are done wrong, yeah, they’re a waste of page, and I’m not claiming there’s a perfect formula, but it’s like any kind of sampler – label samplers for example – there should be some thought behind the how and why of whatever’s being presented so that it actually can grab the audience’s attention with as little of their investment as possible.  You could “let the work speak for itself”, which is how the laziest versions of these things work, but if that was a valid way to get a following, we wouldn’t really need preview books, yeah?

So DEFY has a nice design scheme – bold, mono- / duotone presentation color scheme previews on each page, big lettering – and I actually appreciate that it’s mostly without showing the actual comics, instead using summaries and main images and quotes to provide a gist.  This doesn’t always work, but Vertigo’s a big boy and so they can afford to pull off stunts like that.  The look of this thing, in fact, sells it 100%, as I found myself flipping through and reading pages for books I know I don’t care about.

Knocking off a star, though, cause editor Bond namedrops a Morrison project and then it doesn’t actually appear in the preview, and the whole DEFY scheme is pretty dumb – Veritgo DEFYies (sic, womp) expectations, so each page DEFYies something, and it really stops making sense after the first couple uses.  And Bond’s ‘we’re so cool’ editorial at the start is expected, but they sort of went overkill with quotes from the authors / artists about how their dream was to work at Vertigo.  Okay, we get it.

Peter Milligan’s project sounds suspiciously like The Extremist…  But we’ll see.