The Divided States of Hysteria #1

[history79]

10 pages of 30

Comments

[jlbarnett]

well, this is obnoxious as shit.

[squirle]

I'm sure I would have an opinion on the story, but all those letters splattered all over the page make this thing completely unreadable to me.

[informationgeek]

It's pure, visual noise dribble. That's what this is.

[speedingtortoise]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who couldn't figure out how to read this :p

[mastermahan]

Seriously. This thing is so visually cluttered it's insane. Rows of random characters, tiny semitransparent tweets, rectangular dialogue boxes, superimposed talking heads... The worst, I think, is the narration boxes. 3d effect text in an obnoxious font over a patterned background in boxes that have their own 3d effect with a bright red shadow!

Since Howard Claykin is not a 13-year-old using PowerPoint for the first time, the only way this makes sense is if Claykin actively hates his readers.

[halloweenjack]

It reads like someone who just read American Flagg! and wanted to do something more contemporaneous, but in the same mode, and had more ambition than talent by orders of magnitude.

[starwolf_oakley]

Howard Chaykin did "off the wall" stuff like this in AMERICAN FLAGG, didn't he?

[skjam]

Better, but yes.

I've long suspected that Mr. Chaykin's main weakness is that he only knows how to write one male protagonist.

[drmanbot]

I couldn't get past the WWII era tanks guarding the white house in the age of drones and mobiles. Did he google the wrong page to reference when he drew them??

[q99]

I'm struck by, other matters aside, it's just a very visually poorly put together comic. Bubbles are all blocks. The little text near the border of panels just distracts. Poses and head tilts often look off.

[lb_lee]

Yeah, I didn't even read it, the visuals were just so... WEIRD to me. Did Chaykin DRAW this? I thought he was better than this...

[tripodeca113]

According to this review ,this issue also features " There’s John Henry Noone, who wants to kill as many white people as possible; there’s Chris, a trans sex worker, who kills several johns in self-defense after they discover her secret; there’s serial killer John Nacamulli; there’s con man Paul Berg, who murders a herd of rich people and embodies the worst stereotypes of “evil, money-grubbing Jew.”

Well I won't be buying this series that's for sure. Also the art is off, and the sound effects and captions are really poorly done

[mesmiranda]

I tuned out after the guy getting a massage on the plane, what happened?

[jlbarnett]

another thing, do they mention the VP dying? Because it says the President and a ton of the Cabinet dies and then says that if what the main character thinks will happen happens they'll be reaching even deeper into the Cabinet for President, seemingly skipping the VP

[beyondthefringe]

To steal a word from Tigerkaya...

meh.

To elaborate:

blarg.

This feels like an example of how not to tell a story through words or art.

[katefan]

By the way, the cover of issue #4 was changed because the original had a Pakistani man hung and castrated on it. I am not shocked that Howie went that low, but what depresses me is the suits at Image green lit that crap.

Just because you're a "legend" in the industry does not give you carte blanche. This is pure garbage.

[wizardru]

See, the funny thing is that Chaykin used to write this sort of thing as irony, back in the early 1980s. The problem is that I don't think he's being ironic now and it's really not a good look.

When he did American Flagg, it was mildly wry commentary combined with some visually unique work. He's lost the ziptone work here, but it's cluttered as Hell. But it was obvious by the time he started doing The Shadow that he had a hard time confusing 'edgy' or 'pushing boundaries' with just 'offensive' or 'insensitive' (see rich white old man character giving another character AIDS saying 'You wanted Sex and Death, Baby, you got Sex and Death.')

What's equally surprising to me here is how bad the actual character drawing is. Chaykin used to be a much better draftsman than this; look at how awkward the drawings in the bedroom are. That's...that's really bad, not something you'd expect from a 40+ year veteran.

[halloweenjack]

Some people do seem to lose the ability to draw. John Byrne's work was starting to go downhill--there was some DC book of his in which the figures were just weirdly out of proportion, the sort of art error that he used to bitch at other artists for--before he just sort of gave up and started doing his Star Trek photocomics. I've wondered if Jack Kirby's later work was influenced by his failing eyesight (the reason why he was so keen on getting his artwork returned, as he was able to work less). I've noticed the decline in quality in Chaykin's work going back to the Hawkgirl series that Walter Simonson wrote.

And, honestly, that doesn't bother me as much as the overall air of his trying to be the old Howard Chaykin in general, and failing. I didn't blink at the transphobia in the first American Flagg! arc, because I was young and stupid and transphobia was rife in the culture. I know better now, and so should have Chaykin. And this excerpt shows that this series was problematic well before That Cover. Suicide bombers with the bombs inside them? Congratulations, Howard, The Dark Knight came out only nine years ago, although I'm pretty sure that there was prior art before that.

[informationgeek]

It's hard to tell what's worse in the character drawing department. This or Satellite Sam.

[doctor_spanky]

He just took the title from that one Calvin and Hobbes strip

[an_idol_mind]

Every time I see fiction where the President and most of the chain of command gets killed off before the tale starts, I always feel like we missed a much more interesting story.

Killing off the President alone these days would be pretty darned hard, let alone getting to the VP, President Pro Tempore, Speaker of the House, and so on in a short window of time. If you're going to have something like that happen, I feel like it's cheating to just gloss over it.

[leoboiko]

Ok so I feel like someone is in dire need of help, here. Let's pool some money and buy this poor soul some used copies of Understanding Comics, The Design of Everyday Things, The Elements of Typographic Style, Visual Explanations…