A Collection of Comics
It’s best to get my complaint out of way at the beginning: that title is stupid. There, I said it. Of course this is a collection of comics; every comic produced that doesn’t follow one story is a collection of comics. That being said, the content is various shades of brilliant, and I mean that literally. The first half of the book is a silent pictorial representation of the Tower of Babel being built followed by the deity that so many folks seem to actually believe in causing everyone to speak in tongues and wandering off in confusion. Every page of this deserves to be on the wall of a fancy art house somewhere, and I’d know more about where that might be if I had spent much time in fancy art houses. The colors are vibrant, explosive and utterly perfect for the story they’re telling. He also includes the relevant bible passages for this story so you can see exactly what he’s trying to convey on each page. Seriously, this review is about to explode from hyperbole overload, but I don’t know if I’ve seen a more appropriate use of the colors available to tell a story. Everything after this was bound to be a bit of a letdown, but John manages to hold it together for the other three stories. There’s a lost man trying to catch his plane, a man drawing a portrait of a woman and maybe being a bit too honest with it and a fight scene for all you action fans out there. That last one dissolves into blobs of paint and goo, which is some strange way was the perfect ending to a book that started off so tightly depicted. You can read all of these pieces for free on his website, although I’ll bet that you could also order the book if you asked John nicely about it. I have no idea of the price, but it’s in full color and it’s the size of a magazine, so I’d guess at least $7.
