4.5⭐️ ( )

Well damn.

Not really sure what I was expecting from this, to be honest. I've read Brubaker and Phillips excellent Criminal series. And something obviously caught my attention with this particular series, but my TBR pile tends to be about six months between purchase and reading, and I never read the back blurb before starting, so I actually couldn't remember a single thing about this series when I started it.

It's a simple concept, and it's been done in various forms before, but it's also an easy one to screw up. It has the excellent possibility of descending into unmitigated self-righteous cheese very quickly (I'm looking at you, Mark Millar).

Instead, Brubaker and Phillips take their time with the story, building up the characters and their relationships, then showing the fallout of their actions.

It's a fantastic story that's steeped in the hyper-reality of now, and it's all the better for it.

I gotta read more of this. This is excellent. ( )

Dylan is a grad student with a lonely crappy life and then a girl he likes starts sleeping with his roommate. He gets so depressed, he decides to jump off the roof of his apartment building. Miraculously, he gets caught in some laundry lines and survives, but then starts seeing a demon, who claims to have saved Dylan and wants him to remove "bad people." Dylan figures this is his imagination until he starts getting beaten up, eventually retaliating, and then dealing with his remorse. I felt this was a bit slow, but will read Volume 2, because Ed Brubaker is the real deal. ( )

This GN was intense, dark, gritty and yet comical. All of my favorite things in a GN. This graphic is GRAPHIC and is not for the faint of heart.

More to come. ( )

Scary, but still cool. It makes me think of Deathnote. ( )