Paul Pope's Giant THB 1.v.2 apparently came out on 1 October 2003 - although it carries an unusually specific cover date of 15 December 2003.  Regardless, it happens to actually be available for sale in Edinburgh, which gives it a tremendous advantage this week.

THB has been around in various formats for a while now.  This is the latest incarnation, an outsize black and white series.  Pope evidently subscribes to the fashionable (and entirely accurate) view that the pamphlet is a dying format which provides terrible value for money, with the future lying in larger digest editions.  Giant THB clocks in at a very reasonable 96 ad-free pages for $6.95.  Yes, the individual issues are longer than most miniseries.  That's the future for you.

Fortunately for me - given that I've never read the comic before - this issue is consciously designed as a jumping-on point.  That means it includes a recap of the story so far.  In small print.  For two and a half pages.  This may seem a bit excessive, but it's necessary reading.  THB is basically a story about a teenage girl on the run, and her giant robot protector, all set in a post-colonial Mars.  But it plays out against a political backdrop of Martian culture which is pretty much essential knowledge.

For example, if you don't sit down and read the recap ("A brief narrative guide for the perplexed"), you're probably going to find yourself wondering why half the characters are dressing as insects.  Granted, it's probably sufficient to understand that they're members of something that's broadly like the Communist Party with the fashion sense of the Residents.  But a few paragraphs on the theory of Buranchism help tremendously.  At least you'll know exactly why they're dressed as insects.

Which isn't to say that the insect masks aren't strange.  Far from it.  The nice thing about this book, though, is the way it combines a basically straightforward chase plot, detailed politicking, and weird quirkiness, without any of them overwhelming the others.  Pope balances them all into a surprisingly believable world - surprising, at least, given that all the civil servants are dressed as insects and it still somehow rings true.

Pope has always been a fabulous artist and a great storyteller, and the outsize format suits him well.  Some of his action sequences are a little on the busy side, even at this scale.  But for the most part, Pope is just using the extra space to do the sort of eight-panel pages that would look painfully cramped otherwise.  There's an awful lot of information in here, but it stays the right side of overload.

Clever and entertaining at the same time; worth picking up.

Rating: A

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