The Virgin Read: You Have Made Me Very Annoyed!

North 40 # 1
Written by Aaron Williams
Art by Fiona Staples
Published by Wildstorm Comics

Yeah, I'm annoyed. I mean, this again? Okay, I'll give you that it's slightly different than other Zombie/Vampire/X-Files-y stories, but it's too close for my taste, because my calendar is already full. It's not a dead rip-off (no pun intended) of True Blood, but it's close. Set in some random cartoon pastiche of a totally hick town, suddenly overcome by evil of...every kind? Great. Somebody opened Buffy's Hellmouth, but they went below the Mason Dixon. Cheer.

What am I talking about, you ask? Well, here's the short version of what happens in this comic: two characters - some chick in a black evening dress who seems wannabe goth-chic (isn't there an age limit on dressing like that?) and her paunchy guy friend, and you know he's a "friend" -- open some book that should have been marked "restricted" in the library, but wasn't. We are never told the title, but we see the cover. It has one eyeball and weird octopus-like appendages. They open it up, just to read it, seem to fall into some sort of trance and bleed from their nose and ears. While bleeding, they read out loud. 

This is all it takes to "awaken the one who sleeps", and Hell comes forth, or breaks north, or busts loose, however you describe it.  

We're introduced to several characters and subplots only to see what happens to them moments later when they are gotten by this force of...whatever it is. That "how they are gotten" fills up the entire book and is mostly ridiculous versions of the type of fill-the-hour crazy that showed up in every non-myth episodes for Buffy, X-Files, everything else. There's no consistency to this evil, it just turns people into crazy beings that eat their friends, or become zombies or spontaneously combust. Now, there wasn't really any consistency with those shows either, but they also spent a good hour per crazy-event-problem. North 40 just plays the tape from cover to cover.

Here's the thing - I can't even give this a real response yet because it's not finished. Of course it's not - it's a comic book series. But until it's wrapped up I won't be able to tell you if it's been done well. All I can do is compare it to the umpteen billion versions of this particular story I've seen before. It has that same thing going on that goes on in so many other stories - some explanation for what is happening that won't be revealed until...well, television shows rarely end well. I don't know how it works with comics.  

Like--and I'm sorry if you don't like it, but it's where i'm at right now--on True Blood right now. First we've got vampires. Vampires, vampires, vampires. That was enough at first. I'm on the edge of our seats learning about all these vampires! I'm keeping up, it's weird, and then: they started to throw in shape shifters. I'm still trying to figure out Maryanne and what her special powers are, how she plans to use those powers, and, Saints Be Praised!, if she has anything to do with the new half-shark-alligator half man (half man, half shark!) on the loose that nearly killed Sookie. And I keep watching because I am just sure that there is going to be some incredibly clever and satisfying explanation and tie-in for all of it. I've talked about this before - enjoying the story and writing being so clever and just out of my minds grasp, but knowing that the pay off is there. That comes with trust. It's harder to build that with comics, especially when I come at it with zero knowledge of who is involved with creating the work. Are they like the ones I've liked? Not? Can that be picked up on a single issue? I don't know, but I'm starting to think the answer is no. They need more time to play it out, they need more than just the one-read estimate.

But in this comic, I don't know. I don't know if it's that I was more interested in uploading pictures to Snapfish and Facebook via my new scanner and so this paled in comparison and felt like an irritant...or if it's just that it's not that good. The very fact that I continued to multi-task while I read, though, seems to indicate a story that was unable to really grab me. I've tried to multi-task on other comics, and it's been impossible--I just couldn't focus on anything but the read, the comic kicked my ass and made me pay attention. I say this because what happens in this comic -- well, it's all too much too soon. Where's the seduction? Don't give it to me all at once. Tease me. Entice me. Get me curious. Make me want to keep up, make me feel like there's something around the corner. This was like standing in front of a pitching machine, being pelted with every kind of weird zombie/vamire/evil incarnation that's available. It's too much. People fell asleep, some fell dead. Others woke up with tails? Some became serpent beings, some became vampire-ish. Someone with an unhinged jaw bit off the entire head of somebody else who apparently didn't get any powers at all. One drowned and came back to life. Possessed. I mean, what exactly is this unleashed power? Is it a magic grab bag?

It can't be this hard. There's just no way.

-Nina Stone, 2009

Comments

[Matthew J. Brady]

This is good. The review, I mean.

[Joe Willy]

Well, ripping off the openings to popular TV and films seems to have worked well for other long-running comic book series ; )

Not having seen True Blood I have no idea how close it is or not to that show. I loved the art and the writing didn't put me off too much (the characters seem bland, some of the story muddled or not interesting). I figured the opening issue was just to get you hooked on the mystery of what happened (not enough set up or investment in the characters so I think the writer failed here) and the rest of the series will play out and follow the characters dealing with the apocalyptic event, so it might be hard to judge the series on the first issue as much as it can be judged on the second issue. It would have been a very good $1 Vertigo first issue.

[AERose]

Oh man, two Kool Keith references in one review. I don't even know how to respond to that.

[Biweekly Mortgage Calculator]

Great article.