Finally for this week, Nightly News, a six-issue miniseries from Image by somebody called Jonathan Hickman who apparently hasn't made comics before.

From the look of it, Hickman has more of a design background than a conventional one in comic book art.  This is a very designery comic indeed, complete with highly stylised artwork, random circles all over the place, infographics taking up half the page, and such forth.  Often this kind of thing ends up looking a bit silly, but Hickman is doing it right.  It's more of an illustrated novella than conventional comics storytelling, but the art is integral to the feel of the book, and the slightly soulless, distancing effect plays nicely against the subject matter.  Besides which, it's just plain pretty, not to mention visually innovative.  It gets on my good side right from the start.

The story involves a group of vigilantes out for revenge on the news media, who they blame for cheerfully trashing people's lives without particularly caring about accuracy or corrections.  Frankly, there are no particularly sympathetic journalist characters in this book, and with the story told from the killers' point of view, it starts off seeming fairly one-sided.  But then, the killers are plainly downright insane - they're a quasi-religious cult, and wouldn't be out of place in a Chuck Palahniuk novel.  Ultimately, Hickman doesn't seem much impressed by either side of the argument, although he's got another five issues to develop it.

There are some genuinely interesting ideas in here - with the major media organisations now so big as to be major political players in their own right, are they not inevitably distorting what they report on?  Hickman doesn't think there's any sort of active conspiracy in the news media; rather, he thinks they're driven by forces which inevitably mean they're not really interested in truth at all, merely in telling the stories they want to promote or which they think their audiences want to hear.  There's undeniably a lot of truth in that view; journalists exist to take raw data and arrange it into a story, which slants almost any report, no matter how well intentioned.  There is always an angle.  You can't structure a report without one.

Where the book falls short is with the characters.  Frankly, it could use some more rounded, developed human beings.  But that isn't a fatal flaw.  The stylised storytelling allows the book to get away with these sort of people.  Besides, this isn't a book about people; it's a book about big, satirical ideas.  And it has plenty of those.

Not perfect, but far and away the most interesting new comic I've read in quite a while.

Rating: A

back | continue