From the solicit: “This one-shot anthology is loaded with unsettling short stories that will hijack your imagination and take you to strange, mysterious places.”

I felt this anthology focused more on settling than unsettling. From the opening Swierczynski story, we have a tentatively cool concept: a guy with a super science arm has his back story told by fellow bar patrons. And, at first, it has the potential to be interesting, and then…it isn’t. Imagine a Twilight Zone episode where a man who loves to read survives a nuclear holocaust and ends up in a library only to discover there was no nuclear holocaust and Soylent Green is made of people. It, umm, I guess it’s a twist ending, but who cares?

I love good sci fi, but there isn’t any of it in this comic. Diggle’s story didn’t engage me (which is common, I’ve only ever enjoyed his Hellblazer). Ming Doyle’s story is trite, but with Lesbians! which doesn’t make the story any less predictable and stale. Ann Nocetti’s “Here Nor There” story made me angry that she got paid for it. It’s cheap conceptually and with bad dialog.

At this point, I’m halfway through an EIGHT DOLLAR comic, and there hasn’t been a single good page. An intrepid reviewer who was getting paid to publish his or her opinion would be obligated to finish the book and comment on each story. I don’t have to. So I skipped to the Allred story at the end. And it’s just as pretty, and just as mind-numbingly trite.

This collection reads like a high school sci fi anthology where a bunch of Freshman are given five to ten pages to tell their story, but they’re matched up with professional artists.

Visually, this book is gorgeous. There isn’t a single page that doesn’t grab me. It’s the only reason I read as much as I did.

It’s a shame with the volume of talented sci fi authors currently in the comic book industry that this is the book Vertigo came out with, and that they’re charging eight bucks for it (it’s thick…quantity-wise it’s eight dollars worth of paper…it’s just the writing that’s lacking.)