Review: Narcoleptic Sunday by Jeremy Haun and Brian Koschak
Narcoleptic Sunday
by Jeremy Haun and Brian Koschak
A one night stand is brutally interrupted by two masked gunmen, resulting in the murder of a woman named Jill. As she lay dying, her partner Jack sleeps peacefully. Jack suffers from a condition which sounds an awful lot like narcolepsy - although he insists it isn’t - and by the time he wakes up the murderers are long gone. Jack becomes determined to solve the mystery of Jill’s death, because even though they had just met he’s pretty sure she was The One and he’s madly in love. As he follows a series of notes and clues he’ll run afoul of more gunmen, strippers, a transvestite pimp and the law.
As a noir crime drama, the story is OK. Cursing the main character with narcolepsy makes it a little different from most tales in the genre, since Jack actually has a legitimate reason for blacking out and missing key moments. But the trade-off is that Jack’s constantly falling asleep and waking up with an unexpected visitor in the room. It gets really repetitive after a while. I guess I’m not much of a believer in love at first sight, because Jack’s attachment to Jill after knowing her for only a few hours seems very unbelievable. So that was another thing that bothered me as I read. But the biggest problem was the total predictability of the story. Every major twist to the story could be seen coming from a mile away.
But it’s a familiar yarn well told. Brian Koschak’s illustrations suit the mood of the story perfectly. His women are gorgeous and sexy and his bodyguards hulking and menacing. The main character is good-looking in a bedraggled sort of way - just what you’d expect from a man who has been running around on adrenaline for a couple of days.
The one oddity is that the final chapter suddenly switches panel format. Up until that point, the story employs the standard left-to-right one page comic book style of storytelling, but it suddenly changes to stories that move across a page spread instead. It took me a page or two catch on to the transition, and in the meantime the narrative got really confusing and stopped dead. It’s not that I have any problem with two-page spreads specifically, but if the device hasn’t been employed at all and then suddenly becomes the dominant mode of storytelling, it’s jarring.
But if you like mysteries with plenty of boobs and bloody violence, Narcoleptic Sunday may be right up your alley.
3 out of 5 stars
To read more about Narcoleptic Sunday, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.
Peeking into the archives...today in:
2012: Sailor Moon Vol. 3 by Naoko Takeuchi
2011: Fashionista Piranha will be on hiatus for a while…
2010: Bite Me by Christopher Moore
2009: Winner: Diggin’ Up New Reading
2008: The Aviary Gate by Katie Hickman
by Jeremy Haun and Brian Koschak
A one night stand is brutally interrupted by two masked gunmen, resulting in the murder of a woman named Jill. As she lay dying, her partner Jack sleeps peacefully. Jack suffers from a condition which sounds an awful lot like narcolepsy - although he insists it isn’t - and by the time he wakes up the murderers are long gone. Jack becomes determined to solve the mystery of Jill’s death, because even though they had just met he’s pretty sure she was The One and he’s madly in love. As he follows a series of notes and clues he’ll run afoul of more gunmen, strippers, a transvestite pimp and the law.
As a noir crime drama, the story is OK. Cursing the main character with narcolepsy makes it a little different from most tales in the genre, since Jack actually has a legitimate reason for blacking out and missing key moments. But the trade-off is that Jack’s constantly falling asleep and waking up with an unexpected visitor in the room. It gets really repetitive after a while. I guess I’m not much of a believer in love at first sight, because Jack’s attachment to Jill after knowing her for only a few hours seems very unbelievable. So that was another thing that bothered me as I read. But the biggest problem was the total predictability of the story. Every major twist to the story could be seen coming from a mile away.
But it’s a familiar yarn well told. Brian Koschak’s illustrations suit the mood of the story perfectly. His women are gorgeous and sexy and his bodyguards hulking and menacing. The main character is good-looking in a bedraggled sort of way - just what you’d expect from a man who has been running around on adrenaline for a couple of days.
The one oddity is that the final chapter suddenly switches panel format. Up until that point, the story employs the standard left-to-right one page comic book style of storytelling, but it suddenly changes to stories that move across a page spread instead. It took me a page or two catch on to the transition, and in the meantime the narrative got really confusing and stopped dead. It’s not that I have any problem with two-page spreads specifically, but if the device hasn’t been employed at all and then suddenly becomes the dominant mode of storytelling, it’s jarring.
But if you like mysteries with plenty of boobs and bloody violence, Narcoleptic Sunday may be right up your alley.
3 out of 5 stars
To read more about Narcoleptic Sunday, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.
Peeking into the archives...today in:
2012: Sailor Moon Vol. 3 by Naoko Takeuchi
2011: Fashionista Piranha will be on hiatus for a while…
2010: Bite Me by Christopher Moore
2009: Winner: Diggin’ Up New Reading
2008: The Aviary Gate by Katie Hickman