Ok so I’m gonna soap box here for a minute. Please pardon my little rant.

Dark =/= good, deep, or even emotional.

Some comics REALLY suffer from this. I think I’ve made the statement “it has really well done, thematically appropriate, stylized art that fits the dark tone of the comic” a half dozen times recently. It kinda of bothers me. Like why do people think that doing some hyper stylized, unbelievably dark tone automatically makes a comic “good”?

I think it takes a lot more skill to craft a comic that has an upbeat or neutral tone. The Captain America movies did a fantastic job of portraying an heroic character in a shitty world and still kept it upbeat! “Life sucks”. Congratulations, you’ve discovered what every 8th grader has. Harping on it for 64 pages while you tell what would otherwise be an interesting story doesn’t lend gravity to a story- it detracts from it.

I get that HBO and other contemporary media sources kind of made this a “thing” but if I have to slog though ANOTHER dark “twisted” or “grittily realistic” indie comic I’m going to go insane. I’ve really done a million of them. Doing this doesn’t make you “unique”. It makes you trite. It’s not fun to read and doesn’t make me want to come back for more. It’s like a punishment from the comic gods. I guess I need to add that to my list of “so often overdone genres of indie comics” right there next to ill-thought out superhero comics with no substance 😦 .
Ok, sorry. I had to get that out of my system. Now back to reviewing gritty, twisted, dark, indie comics…