Enormous – A Review

On a whim I ordered Enormous from my LCS. It took awhile to get it because I do my books via mail order and the book was enormous, in what used to be called the Treasury Edition size. Once a month or so all the hard covers and other odds and ends get shipped to me via parcel post to save cost and makes all of our lives easier, this shipment included the aforementioned book.

Hard to Tell How Big It Is

Compared to a regular comic it is huge

The book was an enormous failure and disappointment. The book deserves the pun. If you are calling your book Enormous you are asking for the bad puns.

Compared to my Wally Wood Artist Edition
It is not enormous

The problems were many. The story itself had almost no narrative flow. I often had to check the last page to make sure I had not accidentally flipped two pages and missed something. From page to page we would merrily skip through times and locations. In a world where jump cuts are made as a stylistic choice a writer has to be skilled enough to make it work. It not only did not work here it made the read an excoriating one. The next mistake in writing was the introduction of a cast that makes Expendables appears to be a one man show. When you add into it the artwork's inability to make many of the characters distinguishable from each other the confusion continues to grow. The entire book is an excuse to have these dinosaurs like creatures intermingle with normal humans in what is a post apocalyptic world. After forcing myself to read the entire book I got a little better picture of what was going on but was left flat and cheated out of $10. In some ways the book was too ambitious and tried to be an adventure story, a story of trying to save the world of tomorrow, a government conspiracy story about what caused the event and occasionally was trying to build characterization. It felt like it should have been a much longer book and told in a more linear fashion. In the end it was a gimmick.

Avoid this book and save some money, the darn thing is so big I will have to pawn it off to either Gwen or Jamie, since it is too big to mail to any other people I send comics to.

I know, I know, I have done three posts and we are talking about whether we will continue the blog or not. It is freeing to be able to post whenever and if I feel like it though.