| Title: | John Carpenter's Asylum |
| Contributors: | Bruce Jones Leonardo Manco John Carpenter Thomas Ian Griffith Sandy King |
| Publisher: | Storm King Comics |
| Issue #: | 1 |
| Year: | 2013 |
| Pages: | 26 Pages |
| Age Rating: | 18+ (Nudity, Adult Themes, Violence, Gore, Religious and Demonic Themes, Adult Themes) |
| Story Grade: | C |
| Art Grade: | D |
Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.
That appears to the message of this book. But I can't get past neither what I see or read. I see characters that have been recycled from other stories that were told better the first time. I hear "one-liner" dialog that tried to be deep and meaningful, yet comes across as shallow attempts to deepen characters that we have been shown very little backstory. A priest that has fallen from grace, a faithless cop, drug dealers and homeless people that are portrayed as nothing more than victims of demonic possession or blessed with heavenly gifts.
This is a very shallow approach to character development. There isn't even a hint of what caused Detective Duran to lose his faith; the reader is simply left to wonder why he lost his faith. There is only a hint of why Beckett was defrocked, but no reason at all given as to why his issues with authority are of legendary status.
Shallow characters plague this book from start to finish. To the point that when one of the characters, who may or may not be included in two separate scenes (I couldn't verify that it was the same character), was killed, the impact of the particularly gruesome killings is lost because the reader doesn't care about the character.
The artwork is filled with gratuitous nudity (yup, nudity for the sheer sake of nudity starting on page five), misogyny and sexual innuendos; both are aspects of the book which serves little to no purpose to forward the plot or character development.
This book is nothing more than "End of Days" meets "Constantine" meets "The Matrix", meets "The Bible" meets "Max Payne", except with flat characters and John Carpenter's name thrown on it.
The script has some issues that when combined with the panel layout and reuse of color palette between scenes makes many of the transitions from one scene to another sharp and hard to identify.
This book is just what I would expect coming from something with John Carpenter's name on it. Don't get me wrong. Carpenter has done some amazing things in the past; "The Thing", "They Live" and "Halloween" come to mind, but he has his share of the less-than-amazing things since those movies. And this, is one of those in my opinion.
Now here comes the point where I take a issue with Comixology specifically.
With the amount of gore and three completely separate scenes that contain female nudity, one of which is full frontal (pubic region is obscured by shadows) and the numerous adult themes that are played out, this book should be rated about the same as an R rated movie. But on Comixology, it isn't, and it was a free download over the Free Comic Book Day weekend. But I will address much larger issue in an upcoming essay. I just wanted to point this out in regards to this book.
The quality of the artwork is hit and miss. The big hits for me in regards to the art is the use of subdued colors and deep shadows to minimize some of the gore and nudity making it more about the story and less about the fluff and stuff.
The color palette is gorgeous, but in the first few pages, the lettering is difficult to read do to the use of a red font on a charcoal, not-quite-black, background, with additional red-hued art in the background. While beautiful in it's presentation, this particular presentation caused me to strain quite a bit to read the text. Thank goodness that painful combination only lasted two panels. But, the presentation lasting for two pages almost caused me to stop reading the book altogether due to the difficulty, and I am not colorblind.
As for the remaining misses in the artwork...
Some of the action sequences were hard to follow. The panels in the action sequences didn't flow well enough for a reader/viewer to be able to follow it smoothly from one panel to another. The use of a panel within a panel will draw the users eye to inner panel first, but if there is substantial content to the left of the inner panel, the reader's eye will be drawn to that as we are trained as readers; left to right, top to bottom. This causes some confusion and ruins the pace of action sequence. Sometimes simplicity is the way to go.
It was difficult, many times, to determine the difference between characters. The two main characters, Beckett and Duran, as drawn so similarly, that at times it was only dialog that queued me into which character I was reading. It wasn't until I realized, about halfway through the book, that one of them was always drawn wearing a trenchcoat. But before that, I didn't know if I was experiencing a flashback or just another poor transition.
Also, many of the nude women all looked the same. I still don't know if a nude woman on the phone was the same nude woman who was, five pages and three scenes later, killed, because she looks the same and her name wasn't used in both scenes.
All in all, I grade this book a D+. It wasn't completely terrible, but wasn't all that entertaining either.
Until next time... remember you can't judge a book by it's cover or by the age rating.
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