When I was in college I tried to take as many creative writing classes as possible.  Not because I thought it would be an easy grade or even because I loved writing, but because I enjoyed seeing how other people worked, and whether I thought their methods or ideas would work for me.

A common exercise in class was for one person to start writing a story, and at a certain point pass off the plot and characters to someone else.  No matter who it went to, I was always a little nervous about what would happen to these imaginary people that I cared about.  For the most part, I respected all my classmates and their ideas, but in every class there was that one older man or woman who was taking the class, not to become a better writer, but to use it as therapy to write about how their significant other either left them or passed away.  I always dreaded when that classmate would get a hold of something I worked on because I knew it would turn from whatever genre it was (science fiction, mystery, satire) to a soap opera filled with people melodramatically stating why they were having such a hard time dealing with…whatever the previous author had laid down.

John Ostrander is totally that guy.

I don’t know whether this comic just hit too close to home for him (and if it did, I’m sorry for him), but this was just over the top bad writing.  Everything about this issue is bad, which is a huge let down, given how solid the previous issues of have been.

I know there’s cancer involved, but the volume of tears in this comic could be desalinated and used to irrigate The Sahara.  And the amount of quick head whips away from the camera could power a decently sized wind farm.

Graham Nolan’s art is ok, but he seems to throw in cross hatching almost at random.  And his art looks much better without it.