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This was every bit as good as the original Top Ten, maybe even better.

I absolutely loved this book. At heart, it is a story about outsiders and racism, about culture clash, and a melting-pot society. It’s maybe also about coming of age and coming out. At face value, it’s the story of how the city of Neopolis is formed. Neopolis is the main setting for Top 10, and this is a prequel that takes place in the city’s early days.

I’m finding it hard to say anything because I don’t want to give anything away. It’s such a great story, and of course Gene Ha’s artwork is phenomenal as well. The whole thing is given a sort of sepia toned color pallet–subdued, which lends a sort of old-timey feel to the whole thing, like watching an old black and white movie or something. But the art is no less spectacular for it.

Read this book! Read the original Top 10 first, but don’t stop there, or you’ll be missing out.

So, I must reiterate that I really dug Top 10. It blew me away, and I couldn’t wait to get more of them. And while I didn’t dislike this, it didn’t grab me in the same way. I liked the art, and the story was ok, but it didn’t have the same hugeness factor. It didn’t feel like it was just brimming with possibility and promise the way Top 10 did.

In my post about Top 10 vol. 1 and 2, I suggested that I’d have to try and find Smax at Wizard World because it was the next in the series. I did end up finding it, in the artist alley, on Zander Cannon’s table. He was in the middle of a conversation, but I interrupted him long enough to buy a copy and have him sign it. He suggested I go tell Gene Ha how much I’d liked Top 10, and told me I really didn’t need to read the other parts of the series in order, as they were all pretty disconnected. He also said they’re starting up another Top 10 series that’s going to take place just after the first two TPBs. He seemed to think it was going to be out pretty soon. (I never did end up finding Gene Ha.)

Also in that last post, I sort of blamed Alan Moore for how great those first two TPBs were, giving the artwork second fiddle. I think I’d like to retract that statement now. It really was the art in Top 10 that made the comic, it was absolutely fantastic, and the writing was only just a cut above passable, balancing out somehow into a really great comic for me. Smax, on the other hand, had a very different artistic style. A lot more cartoony and, unfortunately, without all the crazy detail in every panel that really endeared me to Top 10. Don’t get me wrong, the art was totally good, and interesting, just not as interesting as Top 10.

It was also pretty different in terms of scope and scale, setting, everything, really. The character of Smax had always seemed so cynical in the first comic, just a loner, without any real social skills, but I guess he just never seemed dumb to me, and they really made him out to be a bit daft in this comic. Although maybe he wasn’t, and just had friends (relatives, really) who made him out to be. Either way, I didn’t particularly like that direction.

My only other quibble was the incest factor. For those who haven’t read the comic, I’ll try not to spoil it for you, but incest is suddenly acceptable by the end of the comic. I think it’s an interesting question, the concept of whether, maybe, in a fairy tale universe with different rules and all that, maybe incest would be acceptable. But in this comic, it was really just a minor sub-plot. I don’t really feel like the comic sold us on that concept. So it just ended up feeling jarring. Maybe that was the point, but in an otherwise pretty fluff-filled, humorous comic about a dragon slaying, it was a sub-plot that just felt out of place, and maybe didn’t need to be there. But then again, I’m not Alan Moore.