Bad outfit, bad tattoo, excellent writing and artwork.

Okay, no matter how much I may love their writing from time to time, certain writers such as Neil Gaiman, Allan Moore, etc… have a very annoying tendency to have their characters appearances made stupid to order. I cannot say that I like the appearance, or, for that matter, the name of Neverwhere’s main gal, Door. All too often with such writers we see characters (women mainly) who have ridiculous and drastically over complicated appearances and children’s bed-time story, short-bus exclusive, far too exacting names: Fox, Book, Door, etc. Also these books quite often have the most taxing of names (see every book by Moore – okay, an example: “Yuggoth Growths” and “Hypothetical Lizzard,” there is also, though I refuse to demean it, “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” However this book escapes that ruinous stereotype, only to be accursed with all the others.

The positive boon of this book is that though the appearances of a few characters may be something a rebelling teenage girl might think looks great, as Built-to-Spill bounces sound waves off of her sticker-clad, broken, antiquarian mirror (which she loves because its numerous shards represent the complexity that is her emotional and spiritual make-up, the loss of storied value, the danger of searching between the fissures and cracks of her own surface, promises of pain and bleeding, the fractured and unknowable cloud of her own unfixable identity, and the daggers of red, red, drama pointing inward toward a sphere of limited possibility), the writing is superb, although that may be because while the story belongs to Gaiman, Mike Carey is the writer of the comic. The story is intriguing, and you are instantly sympathetic to the characters.

This is a book to watch. It will no doubt have a smaller print run in the following issues, and you should therefore be wary and buy it when it comes out. Gaiman is a great writer and Carey is a better comic writer. This is a fine example. Enjoy it in the dark, kids. Preferably, beside the wavering half-light of a patchouli scented candle (imagine your lifeline is the faint trickle of smoke, your reality the mirage of heat floating loosely above the candle.)

-Peblee