Bleedout

From the publisher: “Bleedout was created to provide back story for CrimeCraft, a free-to-play online video game in which players create characters, form gangs, and engage in fast-paced shootouts for cash and bragging rights.” The book came out in 2011, and when I checked CrimeCraft is no longer going. So what we have here is the back story for a game that doesn’t exist anymore. At the end of ten short chapters we’re told this is the “End of Book One,” but I don’t think there was ever a Book Two. And I think it’s unlikely there are any plans for one now.

I could leave it at that. Really, this is a nicely produced, hardcover (!) graphic novel that reminded me of the booklets that used to come with video games you bought in a box, giving players some fictional context for the world they were entering. Two things stand out about it. First: Mike Kennedy is the author of all the stories, but each chapter has a different artist. This was kind of neat, and while a few of the artists seemed similar, I thought the art was pretty good overall and there were some different styles on tap (albeit not radically different). Second: There is no dialogue. The story is told entirely through narrative exposition. And there is a lot of back story to get through, and quite a few major characters to be introduced: basically our hero and the various leaders of the different Sun City gangs.

Yes, Sun City. There’s a video game location if ever there was one.

There’s not much more to say. We’re in an urban environment after the collapse of civilization as we know it, due to a bacteria that ate up all the world’s oil reserves (which were quickly diminishing anyway). A bunch of criminal gangs have taken over. A mysterious guy called Pilot, who may be a genetically engineered super-soldier, is out for vengeance against one or all of the gang leaders, for something they did, sometime in the past. I guess all of this was going to be explained in Book Two, but now we may never know. Or maybe you figured out what was going on if you played the game . . . but if so then we may still never know.

It is a nice looking comic and I actually thought the world it created was kind of neat, but as things turned out it’s an orphaned world that nothing was ever done with.

Graphicalex