Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Wednesday Review: Prime Cuts

Prime Cuts, Volume 1 can be purchased at IndyPlanet.com; please visit www.primecutsnovel for more information.

 
This is a first for me: the first time I've been asked by the makers to review a product. I was quite surprised. I don't exactly have a large readership. But I'm more than happy to do it. I was also excited when I found out that it was written by John Franklin (Isaac from Children of the Corn), and Tim Sulka (his co-writer for Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return).

That said, I wish I had something good to say about this comic. I really have racked my brain for something positive or something I enjoyed about it, and I just have nothing. I didn't especially hate it, it isn't really long enough to hate, but it doesn't seem to know how to tell it's own story.

The first volume is short enough that I can't reveal too much without spoilers, but I'll cover what I can.

Firstly, I can tell the artist is going for an abstract style, but when proportions change so much between panels, it just looks sloppy. There's no real sense of weight or speed given to anything, even in scenes depicting acts of violence. They just look goofy.

More significantly, though, is the story. It's quite obviously a retelling of Sweeney Todd, but the comic still needs to hammer this home when the protagonist calls himself “Todd Sweeney.” Todd is a barber released from a prison run by monks into a world suffering from a meat shortage, and is sexually assaulted by two different people who give him rides on his way to take revenge on the barber who killed his family. I'm not going go spend this review debating the merits of sexual assault in horror, but I will say that I don't know why it needs to happen twice in a volume already so short.

I could probably still deal with all of this if the characters were remotely compelling, but the story moves too quickly for real development. The woman who seems intended as Todd's love interest seems to help him for...reasons. I suspect the writers were limited in how many pages they could include, and wanted to make sure that something significant happened before the end of the first volume to draw the readers back in. Personally, I think they would have had better luck with flashbacks, or even flash forwards.

I've tried hard to find something good to say about this comic. My readers know I can usually find good qualities even in crappy works. But here I just have nothing. Unless you really want to read a comic by Isaac, skip this one.

No comments:

Post a Comment