Comic review: Adam.3- I dislike not liking this book

Story & Art: Scott Kolins
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Released: 12th August 2015




Um, how do I review this book?  How do I say something about it that isn’t going to sound unnecessarily unkind? I want to like it. I tried to like it, but it’s not doing anything for me.

It’s a book about a family, with an angry (adopted?) son, causing trouble, but the dialogue is so stilted, and so needlessly complicated, and irritatingly disjointed to read.

Why would you do that?

Why would you put so much effort into world creation, and make the dialogue so reader unfriendly?

The world that is being created here, it’s old and new. There’s technology, little orb things, but with a muscled up, Tarzan looking bloke roaming the jungle, chatting to animals (the animals talk back) and sorting out conflicts.

It’s cute, and there are jokes within the text, but I don’t know. Where’s the fun? Is it there? I’m looking, and I’ve read it over and over again, and it feels like work, yes, that’s it, it feels like work.

I can’t get anything from it. I’m flicking back through the pages and some of the art looks great, but none of it means anything, it doesn’t resonate, and I’m a guy that can find meaning in anything, but I can’t find it here. I look and I look, but I can’t find it.

I see the family conflict, and I see the need for revenge, to avenge injury, and I see the jealousy of a sibling, and there’s a greater threat, looming, but I can’t attach that narrative information to anything greater. It just kind of hangs there, alone, in it’s own little world, doing its thing, but not connecting to anything outside.

I can’t stand my meanness here. I dislike not liking the book. I want to like it. I want to rave about it, but there’s a cold awkwardness about it, probably caused by a combination of the dialogue and the generic muscled up protagonist. I have to care about him to care about the book, and I don’t. Is he too perfect? Is he too unrealistically drawn? Is he just a cartoon man that I cannot picture existing in any sort of reality? Perhaps that is why I cannot warm to him? He’s too unreal, and being unreal means that I cannot build any empathy for him.

That could be the problem. I think that it is.

The book looks different. It opens like an art pamphlet, but is that just form over substance? This is a first issue, it’s supposed to impress you, and to hook you, but it didn’t do either of those two things to me, and I feel bad that it didn’t succeed in doing so. Perhaps it’s going to be a grower. Perhaps it will read better as a trade. I hope that it does, because unfortunately, this debut issue is doing nothing for me at the moment.



Rating: 4/10 (Nice design and lovely art, but there’s something missing, and it failed to hook me.)