Review to come ( )

Possession stories scare me. If Robert Kirkman hadn't written this, I wouldn't have picked it up. But now I've read the first volume, and now I'm in.
And possession stories still scare me. ( )

Cape may ( )

A few months ago I was having lunch with an old friend. We were talking about pop culture (a perennial subject of ours) and comic book movie franchises in particular when he said to me, "Normally I don't enjoy comics, but lately I've been reading one that I really like. Have you heard of Outcast? When I replied that I hadn't, he shared with me a link to its page on Libby, and I decided to give it a try.

After having read the first six issues, I still don't know how I feel about it. As much as I usually enjoy Robert Kirkman's writing, this one feels almost frustratingly slow in it's development. The reason for this, at least for me, is in the lack of context: Kirkman starts his readers off in the middle, with Kyle trying to cope with undefined traumas. While many of them are revealed over the next several issues, there's still so many questions that remain unanswered. Paul Azaceta's art contributes to this in a way, being as spare in its form as Kirkman is with the details of what is going on. Yet for all this it's still oddly absorbing, enough so to keep me moving on to the next collection. ( )

Outcast, Vol. 1: A Darkness Surrounds Him by Robert Kirkman, Paul Azaceta, &al., collects the first issues in an interesting new story in just as dark and depressing a world as Kirkman's The Walking Dead and the show. It's an interesting take on possession horror, but here's the thing: I've gotten tired of the depressing and awful trudge through mud that is The Walking Dead, and that's not even mentioning the unappealing-to-me descent fully into torture porn, so the promise of another whole series just as persistently relentlessly repetitively rotten and dark just doesn't do it for me. Beyond the gore in this one, given the way exorcism horror goes, more torture porn is sure to come as well. It's not bad. It's actually good at what it does. I just have trouble finding a way to want to go further in either story. But, if you've got the wanderlust for more dark travels without respite, this would no doubt appeal. For myself, I enjoyed it for a while, and again here, but I've moved on.

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