Looking For a Good Book

I have no idea how to rate and review this book.  Both the story and the art have confounded me and I have read through this three times.

Cosmos is a caped superhero-like being who was created in a big bang – the same big bang that wiped out human life (the bigger bang than that which created human life).  Cosmos flies about space and saves planets from destruction.  Another being, named King Thulu (who happens to look a lot like H.P. Lovecraft’s monster Cthulu) wants Cosmos destroyed.  But Thulu is more a of comical character and not respected, only feared, by his subjects.  Meanwhile, Cosmos is not particularly confident with who he is, though he never wavers in his determination to save life (and typically that life fears and vilifies him).  Thulu sends a woman, a three-eyed, green woman, to be a companion to Cosmos.  She finds herself drawn to him.

That’s the story so far, in a nutshell.

My biggest issue with the story is that I can’t tell if I should be taking any of it seriously, or if it’s all simply a big joke, or if it’s a combination of these.  Thulu’s too much of a joke to be taken seriously, and Cosmos, despite his power and intentions is a patsy.  But the girl, Wyan, is quite well created and has the serious manner that I would expect in this story.  But it is hard to take her too seriously given the other major characters around her.

And now let us discuss the art….

I can’t stop looking at this art.  It has definitely established a style all its own, different from any other graphic novel that I’ve ever read.  But is it good?  Clearly what’s ‘good’ in relation to art is subjective.  And still, I can’t decide if it’s ‘good.’

The art looks as though the artist threw together some rough draft samples for approval, complete with spilled ink all over the pages, and someone looked at it and said, “That’s great. Don’t clean it up, leave it just like that.  Maybe add a lot of ink splatter on all the pages.  Now color it in.”

Rough, sketchy, splatter-filled art with a story that doesn’t currently have an obvious direction with characters who are more caricature than anything real, in a setting in which the earth and humanity are already gone… what is supposed to draw me to this book?  And yet — I am drawn to it, and I don’t know why.

Because I’ve returned to this book repeatedly, even though I can’t say that I like it, I give it three stars.  I would check out the next volume and hope that things become much clearer (story and art).

Looking for a good book?  The Bigger Bang is a graphic novel that comes across as roughly created, but has much potential … it’s just hard to see where it’s going with this first volume.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Bigger Bang

author: D.J. Kirkbride

artist: Vassillis Gogtzilas

publisher: IDW Publishing

ISBN-10: 1631402595

paperback, 128 pages