CROSSED FAMILY VALUES #1 (OF 6)

Review by: akamuu
Writer: David Lapham
Artist: Javier Barreno & Jacen Burrows
Cover Artist: Jacen Burrows, Juan Jose Ryp & Javier Barreno

Size: pages
Price: 3.99

Having recently read his run on Batman, and flipped through his Young Liars title, I get the feeling David Lapham constructs his stories around fortune cookies he gets from American Chinese restaurants.  His dialog makes me cringe.

What really makes this title suffer though, is that Lapham follows Garth Ennis.  Eniis set up a wonderful concept of a world overrun with some sort of sexually deviant zombies.  No real explanation is given for their existence.  They are just suddenly everywhere, and people have to contend with them.  What kind of people?  People people.  Ennis gives very little back story to the characters.  The odds are good that if you find out a little something about who a character was before The Crossed crisis, then that character was about to be killed.

When Ennis wanted you to know a woman had been in an abusive relationship, she had a mangled ear.  When asked how it happened she said something to the effect of “Husband put it to the stove, it was the last thing he did.”  Simple, direct, now back to crisis.

Lapham has painfully set up his characters with an agonizing background.  Woe is me rape.  Isn’t that sick, incest.  Trite ham-fisted I’ll show you daddy.  And then The Crossed show up.

By setting up what they’ve been through before The Crossed, I care about these characters much less that I cared about the ones from Ennis’s run, who I knew nothing about.  There was a sense of urgency from the first page.  Here, there’s just…shlock.

Barreno’s art is nearly worthy of succession from the previous run.  Stylistically similar, very basic page layouts.  His two page spread is boring, but well-intentioned.  There are details that show he knows how to add a little depravity, but there’s nothing frightening about the mob of Crossed, nothing ominous.

Story: 1 - Poor
Art: 3 - Good

Comments

  1. OK, Crossed isn’t for everybody, I’m fine with that.  But if you found Addy’s reaction to her father’s abuse "trite and ham-fisted"…..I feel sorry for everybody in your life. 

     Crossed volume one was a brutal examination of surviving human evil. This volume appears to be about defying human evil, which is probably even more important, and it’s a worthy successor if you appreciated the first.  

  2. @ryanlee: You feel sorry for everyone in my life because I don’t like trite writing?  Why?

    As for what’s "more important" as a theme, it doesn’t matter to me.  You may be someone who reads comics for their message, I read them for their story.  I like stories that either deal with something I haven’t encountered in comics, or comics that take a familiar story trope and twist it into an unfamilar way.

    There was nothing in this story that seemed fresh (whereas the first series did seem fresh to me), and the fact that the protagonist has had a hard life is a tired trope.  It also wasn’t written in such a way that it felt real to me.  It was like hearing a poor storyteller describe the worst Lifetime Movie Of The Week on abuse.  Yes, the content should have been heart wrenching and inspiring, but it just wasn’t.

    You, of course, are free to love it, but my not liking it doesn’t mean I’m unfeeling.

  3. @ryanlee: Also, if you did enjoy this, you might want to check out Lapham’s Batman series "City of Crime."  I thought it was poorly executed and uninspriring, but it was very thematically similar, in that it dealt with abused, downtrodden people overcoming adversity.  Plus, you know, Batman was involved.

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