Clarity has not been Keith Giffen's strongest suit of late.  Yes, okay, Formerly Known as the Justice League is easy to follow - but that's scripted by somebody else, and it's written in the style he was using back in the 1980s.  Most recent Giffen books have laboured under cryptic exposition that seems to have been erected almost as a barrier to reading the book.  Dominion and Suicide Squad, in particular, were frequently extraordinarily difficult to understand.

Reign of the Zodiac kicks off in a somewhat similar manner, which does not bode well for its long term future.  This first issue is devoted to explaining the central premise of the series and making a start on the first storyline.  Basically, it boils down to this: way back in the mists of time, Earth was linked by portals to the planet Eidolon.  The ruling twelve houses of Eidolon - each representing a sign of the Zodiac - used Earth as a slave colony until the people there had an uprising.  The magicians on Eidolon decided to make a "disciplinary strike" to teach the slaves a lesson, but only ended up severing the link and sinking Atlantis into the process.  Since then, the twelve houses have been fighting among themselves in a neverending war - and a marriage between House Virgo and House Aries is now planned, in order to tip the balance of power.

That's basically the first issue.  But Giffen, being Giffen, wants to make the audience work for their exposition.  Boy, does he want to make them work.  The issue takes the form of a dialogue between the young groom and his mentor, in narrative captions over scenes illustrating the history of the planet.  The idea is apparently to illustrate the subjectivity of history and the extent to which the accounts are distorted by spin.  It doesn't help that the colouring has failed to sufficiently distinguish between the two narrative voices; one is orange, one is dark yellow, and believe me, unless you are holding the book under a bright light, you can't tell the bloody things apart.  Nor are the speech patterns all that different; so my first attempt to read this book ended up bogged down in an attempt to work out who the hell was talking 90% of the time.

While the information is there, it's buried in digressions and scattered around so as to lack all flow; and the dialogue often loses touch entirely with what the art is showing.  No doubt Giffen intended this as a bit of formal experimentation, making use of the unreliable narrator.  The problem is that it's so busy being tricksy about the way the story is told that it never really gets around to telling the story at all.  You're left with an issue of scattershot information from which the attentive reader could extract a plot - and a plot set, from the characters' perspective, back in the mists of time.  This is all background material, with the real plot only starting to come along at the very end of the issue.

Reign of the Zodiac has all the hallmarks of a book whose devoted cult audience will decry the unappreciative majority for not putting in the effort.  Perhaps they have a point, but why is so much effort required?  Does the story really gain anything from being quite this garbled?

On the plus side, it does have beautiful artwork by Colleen Doran.  The basic idea isn't bad, if you like that sort of thing.  But it's a real chore to read.  Ultimately, the book is so busy trying to be clever that it's forgotten to be entertaining.

Rating: C+

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