It's been a while since I heard Joe Kelly's name.  He wrote X-Men for a couple of years in the late nineties, before succumbing to the weight of editorial interference and quitting. 

Since then, he's produced a mixture of mainstream superhero and animation work, alongside some very quirky side projects.  I Kill Giants is the latest such book, a seven-issue Image miniseries with artist JM Ken Niimura. 

Fifth grader Barbara Thorson is a somewhat unco-operative teenager who does a bit of role-playing on the side.  She also kills giants.  Or so she says.  The issue contains no real evidence of anything of the sort, but she's pretty adamant on the point.  Mind you, we do see her talking to fairies at the bottom of the garden.  So basically, the question is whether she's really fighting giants, or just stark raving mad.

On the face of it, the issue points rather strongly towards "stark raving mad."  After all, giants were the favoured opponent of Don Quixote.

There's an obvious manga influence in the Ken Niimura's art, though mixed with a sketchiness more typical of black and white indie comics.  It's good with the more straightforward scenes, but there are several sequences here that only really become intelligible when they're read in the light of Kelly's interviews.  A page of Barbara looking intently up some stairs, for example, frankly means very little.  We've seen this before with Kelly's more personal projects - the likes of Steampunk tended towards rather obscure storytelling, usually to their detriment.

Although it's billed as the opening issue of a miniseries, this is basically a whole load of set-up scenes, and it's better interpreted as the opening pages of a graphic novel.  It falls into the awkward territory of being mildly interesting, enough that I'd keep reading if the next issue was in front of me - but possibly not enough to make me come back in a month's time. 

An odd little book.  It intrigues me without quite grabbing me.  I might give it another look when the inevitable trade comes out; I suspect it'll be vastly improved in that format.

Rating: B

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