I'm going to keep this review short. I pre-ordered this comic because I thought the concept seemed interesting. In the future, resources are scarce and crops are failing; so any arable land should be used for basic food production and not for non-necessities. Thus, coffee is illegal. You can not grow, buy, or sell it. Thus it is a black market item and those who do any of those things risk running foul of the law and organized crime.

That is the premise of this comic. It's a world full mutants or aliens, or... creatures. Nothing really gets explained other than the main character who gave herself the name Helena Crash, is a coffee runner.

Helena gets caught up in a criminal turf war. She has skills, and a crime boss wants her to use her skills to kill a rival gang leader... or something. She declines his offer, but he won't take no for an answer. 

If you want to know how it ends you'll have to buy next months, because I'm not going to.

Now I love coffee as much as the next guy. Hell, probably more. I drink at least a pot a day, through out the day. I drink it black, bitter, and hot. I enjoy dark roasts, but really am not too particular (I do miss Tim Horton's coffee though). As I type this, I am drinking coffee. I guess coffee is my second favorite beverage after beer. I'm pre-inclined to like this book. That is the problem. That is why I ordered this book. 

I should not have.

The dialog is terrible, the plot line is scattered, and the world that it is set in is... confusing. You might be able to get away with this if you had a competent artist, but god damn, my scrallings on notebook margins from 4th grade look better then this.

Now there are all different kinds of art styles. People will have different opinions on Cubism, Surreal, Abstract, Impressionism... the list could go on. Art historians do go on. In fact, if a picture is worth a thousand words they will make a ten thousand word thesis. In many respects, art is "in the eye of the beholder." 

So I guess if you showed someone the art of this comic and told them that Picasso sketched this as a young boy they would "ooh" and "aww." Show this to anyone on the street and tell them it's a printed comic book, they will say with an upturned eyebrow: "really?" Warwick Johnson-Cadwell maybe a good at story boarding... but, common man.

Now, I only tend to save this kind of mean for Brian Michael Bendis, but this book really disappointed me. This might be the lowest I'll ever score a comic.

Rating: 2.5/10 For keeping the color inside the lines.