The Empty Man
This one left me with mixed feelings.
The main problem I had with it is that it’s murky. What I mean by that is two things. In the first place, Cullen Bunn’s story is so vague (not to mention unresolved at the end) that I honestly had no idea what was going on. There’s an outbreak of suicidal dementia that gets dubbed the Empty Man virus because that’s something the victims are heard to mention. There’s a preacher who thinks this might be a sign from or manifestation of God. Or it might be aliens. Or it might be some actual psychic virus, one that began with a possessed patient zero who the Empty Man cult is keeping alive. I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone in the comic understands either. A pair of FBI agents are investigating, and so is the CDC. They have visions and receive messages, but are these just hallucinations? Again, I don’t know. And we’re never told.
(I should add as an aside here that they made a movie “based on” this comic that was released in 2020. From what I’ve heard, it only has the loosest connection to the comic.)
Then there’s the art by Vanesa R. Del Rey. It’s very sketchy and rough. Which you could say makes it a perfect complement to Bunn’s story: you can’t understand what’s going on and you can’t see what’s going on either. What the hell is happening to the woman’s husband in the first issue? Explosive diarrhea? There’s no amount of looking at that picture that makes it clear to me. In other places the drawing is so crude and the colouring so dark I literally couldn’t locate faces, much less read them. No question Del Rey has her own style, but it wasn’t my thing even if it did give the book a really distinctive feel.
These caveats entered, I still found myself enjoying it, or at least committed to reading along. Bunn and Del Rey do, somehow, conjure up an effectively grimy vision of madness, and if it’s all a mess, well, that could just be the way things fall apart in the end times. But don’t ask me to explain any of it.
Alex Good 
Nah, the End Times are going to be very regularly dystopian. The book of Revelation tells us that (no matter how you interpret it). So sorry, no empty man syndrome for you!
You’ll just have to pretend….
LikeLiked by 1 person
Locusts with scorpion tails and the faces of men? Nothing regular about that!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Most eschatologists interpret that as helicopters. Most of Revelations is symbology, hence why you have so much variety of what it all means.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Helicopters! I didn’t know that. Well, that sounds a little more regular.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’m not saying that’s Definitive, but it’s a very plausible explanation. Especially to someone seeing them from the 1st century.
LikeLiked by 1 person
or it could be some sort of new drone for all we know. Which is why I’m not big on trying to “interpreting” it. I leave that for people who like that kind of thing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Do you use drones for surveying?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Our company doesn’t. But I know a guy who works for a big company down in Mass who got his drone license.
Right now, we don’t do enough big construction jobs where it would be feasible. Too many trees and too many hills to use them reliably I think.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It all sounds a bit odd.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is the first part of a three-volume series. And in the next two parts I can’t say it becomes a lot clearer what’s actually going on.
LikeLiked by 2 people
That would annoy me a bit I think.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It was disappointing.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Is there no pic of the explosive diarrhea so we can judge for yourselves? I heard some positive things about the movie; it’s on Disney +, which from your POV, might as well be screening yesterday in Shanghai…
LikeLike
You want a pic of that? I’ll see if I can snap a decent one.
I’ll leave the movie up to you. Share the load.
LikeLike