Crossed: Wish You Were Here Series Review

Title:	Crossed: Wish You Were Here
Contributors:	Simon Spurrier Javier Barreno
Publisher:	Avatar Press
Issue #:	Series
Year:	2013
Pages:	286 Pages
Age Rating:	21+ (Language, Violence, Gore, Statutory Rape, Sexual Servitude, Suicide, Bestiality, Sex, Nudity, Violence Against Women)
Story Grade:	B
Art Grade:	B

Happy Thanksgiving Day everyone. I hope that your turkey-day is blessed with happy families, blissful food and the comfort that only heavily spiked eggnog can provide.

Just in time for Thanksgiving. I present "Crossed: Wish You Were Here". This is a return back to the basics; great, honest and horrific storytelling about the nature of mankind. And while it is less grotesque, violent and offensive than the original, it still has it's moments of all three.

This is story of a the daily survival routine of small group of survivors on an island off of the England Coast as narrated by one of the members of the group, a former writer of novels and comic books, that decides to make journal entries in an effort to document his daily existence. After two previous series, the original being one of the most outstanding pieces of storytelling in history, there is a lot of mundane details contained within this volume, but there are some new character and story arcs as well that have not yet been previously explored.

Simon Spurrier comes in to take over the writing. Spurrier wanted to include some new elements to the story arc, but did so while retaining what made the original work so well; keeping the story about the people and the horror they create rather than just the horror around them. For instance, while there is a few panels with references to bestiality, including a panel in which a character is chasing an animal while is pants are down around his ankles, Simon uses these panel to describe the depths of depravity mankind will sink to in times of despair making a much needed comparison of mankind to Crossed. After all, mankind is not that different from the Crossed.

And this is really what this book is about. It is an ongoing comparison between what we consider normal people, the accepted norm, and the obviously insane, chaotic infected people; the Crossed. This is where Spurrier brings the series back down a notch from the insanely-extreme, and incest-grossness that Family Values took the series.

"Wish you were here" isn't about shock and awe, it is about human nature and just how vile and repugnant it can be while at the same time showing that mankind has its good moments as well. And Spurrier does a great job of balancing that by focusing on the mundane, but lifting the veil of vile repugnance from time to time to teach a the readers some valuable lessons.

Javier Barreno takes his second turn in the art seat for this series and he does a fine job at being a source of continuity as we change writers yet again from the original series, 'Crossed' to 'Family Values' to his current iteration. Barreno does a great job holding on to the general feel of the world so that the reader feels at home as Spurrier takes the wheel.

All in all I grade this series a solid B+. The story gets an A for bringing us back to the basics of the original story while telling an original survivors tale for this series. Crossed: Wish You Were Here is definitely worth visiting.

Until next time... Remember, not saying no is not the same thing as consenting.