There’s a stiffness to all of them and their anatomy is often bizarre and strangely angled.

Unfortunately, the characters are another story altogether. His storytelling is smooth and uncluttered. Artist Ralf Singh is great at giving a clear sense of scene and place. We just never get a real sense of who Ben is, and that is one thing we definitely need. You’d think this would help give us a clear picture of Ben, but he still is a bit of a mystery, doing things like urging others to have patience with an experiment in one panel and then screaming for them to skip the trial period and go straight to jamming a needle in his eye in the next panel. We learn about the world, Ben’s place in it, and the supporting characters almost entirely through this internal monologue. The lead character, Ben, does a lot of internal monologuing, which serves as the main delivery method of this information. Writer Scott Duvall does his best at giving us a boatload of information. This is not to say it is bad, because it’s not, but there is so much crammed in here that we never really get any idea of what motivates these characters or what propels this world.

Perhaps seeing the film before reading the comic will help the reader get a better sense of the world and the characters, because on its own the comic doesn’t do much. At least, that’s what the back of the first issue told me I am woefully unfamiliar with the source material. Narcopolis: Continuum is a comic series based on a film of the same name.

Narcopolis review