Released on March 11th, 2020
So things are crazy...which is the biggest understatement in the history of the world. The last time the world was like this was probably during WW2...but even then I think the movie theaters were still open and sports carried on (we all remember A League of Their Own) and you could go out to dinner at a restaurant and schools were still open. I suppose the last time the world was amidst in a pandemic like we're having now was back in 1918 during the Spanish Flu outbreak that killed 50 million people. Considering I'm saying that life these days is akin to a time period when 50 million people died...well, that's certainly not good. And since I can't really do much of anything except go to work (most people can't even do that) I figured I'd focus a least a little bit of attention on a project of sorts. I haven't written that many comic book reviews lately and will probably be reading a lot in the next few months (I have 300 comic books on my Ipad still waiting to read) so I figured I'd do a 30 reviews in 30 days feature. Since non-essential businesses are closed in Pennsylvania and, eventually, probably every state, that means comic book stores are going to be closed. Some online have said that, since comic book stores run on razor thin margins, this could mean the end to comic book stores as we know it. This might just be a dark prophecy that won't come true, and comic books will still be on digital, but it's still scary to think about what's going to happen to the comic book business in the future. I'm guessing that most books will be postponed, some cancelled, some stores permanently closed. The future is bleak! Which brings us to Decorum #1, an Image book that came out on March 11th. It was written by Jonathan Hickman, who's one of the premiere comic book writers these days, so it's a pretty big deal. Hickman has always been hit-or-miss for me, though I loved what he did with the X-Men last year (his two, 6 issue mini-series', House of X and Powers of X, were my favorite comic books of 2019) which was his first big, mainstream work in years. He wrote Avengers and Fantastic Four years ago and his The Manhattan Projects Image book was great. So he's pretty much dabbled in it all. Decorum is pretty out there, though, a totally, baffling, futuristic mind fuck of a book. The basic premise is that there's a female assassin for hire in space. The other aspect of the book is that prehistoric societies, like, say, an island of natives that worship an idol as their God or something, are kept as sort of a zoo in parts of the universe by alien beings. I guess that's what's going on? Who the hell knows? Sure, it's only a first issue, but so far it makes very little sense. I guess I wouldn't mind it not making sense if at least it was entertaining, cool, fun, interesting, wild, engrossing...something? It's just kind of weird and eh. The art is pretty fantastic, though. Mike Huddleston did the art (color, inks, everything). Some of it is in color and some is in black and white, sometimes even in the same panel (what this means is...even if there wasn't a virus postponing everything, this book was going to be late every month with all of this detailed, convoluted artwork). And like with every Hickman book, there are a lot of design pages and pages with just text, which I loathe. I guess I'll stick with it to see if it gets any better or if the actual plot/story goes anywhere interesting...but so far this book is pretty much just an acid-dipped mess. 1/2* (out of ****)
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