Transhuman #2 — IPO
May 19th, 2008 by Martin
OK, let me just say right off the bat: This was, for me, a bit disappointing.
Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let me count the ways. First of all, seemingly nothing happens here. We’re interviewing venture capitalists, which, while it may be interesting for someone who knows absolutely nothing about business whatsoever, I found incredibly spoon-fed and dry as a desert bone. Even the subtitle, IPO, didn’t actually happen. There was no exciting IPO, instead it was blah blah blah about who did or didn’t loan money to these companies. As if we care! These characters better come back in the next two issues, or I’m going to consider this whole issue a write-off. The only mildly amusing part of the comic was the two page spread of the VC getting eaten by monkeys. (Monkeys were also the most amusing part of the first comic, so I’m especially glad they made a return here.)
Secondly, the art was unfortunate. Not to say that it was badly drawn, or not my style, but I found it especially repetitive, and frankly, downright boring. Honestly, if I see another page with four panels, each one with just the face of the documentary’s narrator, I’m going to be a bit pissed off. The most interesting art in the whole book was a panel about 2/3 toward the end with a mechanical dog and cat in it. A clearly drawn reference to WE3, and a decent attempt at making this book interesting by association. The second best art was the panel showing the character Dave Apple’s art. It was meant to be pathetically unskilled looking, but it was funny and interesting, two things most of the rest of this comic were not.
The thing is, this is supposed to be halfway through the series; this is issue 2 of 4! And we got about as much story out of this issue as you generally get reading a postage stamp. I had high hopes, and I really wanted to like this comic, but unfortunately, it’s just not working for me.
