What is Behemoth really saying?

Simon Dark: What Simon Does – Nothing Clever To Say Here Folks, Move Along…

OK, so I have been hearing alot of good things about the DC series Simon Dark, so I picked up this trade and read it.  Well, hate to say that I didn’t really like it.

Let me qualify this.  First off, I love Steve Niles.  I think he does amazing work.  He is a great writer.  The art by Scott Hampton didn’t really work for me.  It is that style where it looks like they traced a photograph and added some computer photoshop elements in order to “fuzz” it up for the comic.  The result is a 2 dimensional looking style.  Now that is only my opinion, so I don’t expect it to translate to others.  It is also strange in how the art style disagreed with me.  In action sequences I didn’t mind so much.  In dialog sequences it was difficult to take.  OK, personal call but I am gonna make it.

So despite the art what didn’t I like?  Well, the character was interesting.  Like I said, Steve Niles is one of my favorite authors.  It is just that this trade had six issues and maybe two issues worth of story happened.  It was beyond decompressed.  The first Moon Knight by Charlie Huston trade that everyone complains about had more going on than this.  But that is the thing.  That trade showed that decompressed stories like that need the art to work very well for the experience not to be regrettable.  The reason I liked that trade was that the art was interesting so the fact the so little was happening story wise was not really bothersome for me.  But with this Simon Dark series I have a remove from the art, and that distance makes it hard for me to really get into such a drawn out and decompressed plot.

Prognosis:  I will read some more of this series.  Though I am not feeling the art I think that there will be a pick up in this that will get the story moving.  Risking sounding like an apologist for the series, I think that the tone of the book only peeked through at the end of the trade and that the establishment of the characters took up a better part of those first issues.  As the characters start to flesh out some pages then that exposition can give way to adventure, something the art is not to bad at.