Grass Kings: Volume Two
I enjoyed Grass Kings: Volume One, but I liked that this volume went off in a slightly different direction. In the first book I didn’t care much about the fighting between the Grass Kingdom and the town of Cargill, or about the sheriff’s runaway wife Maria. Instead of more of that, what we get here is an investigation into the possible identity of the Thin-Air Killer. This is a plot line that was only vaguely hinted at earlier, and it’s still left pretty shady. Maybe the T-AK killed a schoolteacher in the Grass Kingdom years earlier. Maybe they killed Robert’s kid. Maybe they killed a young man in the town of Raven back when Bruce was sheriff there. The connections weren’t clear to me.
Of course, it’s in the nature of these things that everyone in town has a guilty secret or two. The back stories of Pike and Archie reveal them to be people who know more than they’re going to share, and the Bird Man seems the most sinister of the bunch. But I still don’t feel like I know any of the Grass Kingdom residents well enough though for this part of the story to come into very sharp focus. And I was left wondering how they were going to wrap things up with only one more book to come. I mean, what’s with this guy Neil living on an island in the lake? Where did that private security force come from? I wonder if maybe there’s too much going on for Matt Kindt to resolve in a satisfactory way.
Interesting stuff though, and great art again from Tyler and Hilary Jenkins. The full-page spread of Pike rowing his boat looks like it was inspired by Winslow Homer and the issue covers done up to look like vintage paperbacks are wonderful. Not sure where things are going, and I have concerns on that score, but I’m looking forward to the finale.
Alex Good 
The art looks cool, not comic-y really, though I don’t do comics so I might be talking rubbish.
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No, it does look different. Watercolours. Gives it all a big-sky, prairie feel and less confined to a grid.
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How do you stop your magnets falling out when you read it?
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The magnets have a death-like grip on the page. They don’t fall anywhere.
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Good luck with the final book. Comic book artists sometimes don’t seem to realize what story telling involves and so bite off more than they can chew. Or they aren’t disciplined enough to simply leave ideas out of their comic. That is what it sounds like is going on here. I hope the final one is satisfactory though.
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Yeah, I really think that was a problem here. The world-building is quite interesting, but the world is too big to really explain in detail, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the hunt for the killer which is the main plotline. There’s too much going on.
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