Comic Review: Come Again (Top Shelf)

A large tome of darkness, with intermittent showers and a bit of lightning, Come Again is heading your way from IDW.

This jumbo trade, written and illustrated by Nate Powell, is a handful. The story occurs in a small hamlet, or perhaps a half hamlet. Way up the mountain, past all the whatevers and the whatchamacallits, where the road ends. The people who live there are what’s in this story is what I’m saying.

Okay, basically this: way up yonder, above the Chattahoochie and all that, there are people. They are just ordinary folk, and since they live in close proximity, sometimes they team up and do naughty things together. In caves. The trouble with all that is that there is also a mysterious being living in the cave already, a sentient being with special powers. He likes to make deals with people on the surface. It’s a bit creepy.

As various storylines begin to take shape, they begin to overlap. This brings more drama into the book, obviously, but also starts to feel ponderous. There are a lot of black pages in this book, with a little bit of dialogue on them. Or a small drawing. Then: turn the page a few more times. You get the picture.

Overall, I was satisfied that the story told and illustrated in duotones by Powell was a good one, and worth telling, but perhaps this book is TOO jumbo. It’s like reading a massive adaptation of a short story; sometimes you are enjoying the heck out of it, and other times you wish the editor had stepped in and made the book tighter and punchier.

IDW Top Shelf, Come Again, $24.99 for 280 pages, no rating shown