Area 10 is a perfect script for a great crime movie, but it misses in some points by not exploring better the original proposal regarding trepanation. It is really Hollywoodian, what is good, but I expedted for a more Vertigo thing.

Chris Samnee's artwork is great and reminded a lot of David Lloyd's work in V for Vendetta.

Mixed feeling but a good read. ( )

This is a creepy graphic novel that I think should stay with older teens or adults. The hero, a police detective, receives a bizarre brain injury that allows him to see the future, albeit not the distant future. He then become obsessed with a case he had been working on before he received the brain injury, and the folklore behind the injury itself. Sorry, no spoliers! ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

As a middle-aged, overeducated white male nerd raised in the late Postmodernist Era, I am of course an adult fan of comic books; but as someone who regularly reads and reviews text-based literature, I'm also a harsh critic of comic books designed for grown-ups, finding the vast majority of them to be the exact teen-quality subpar fluff that most non-fans of adult comics suspect them to be. I mean, just take the recent Area 10 for a good example, the latest by the new "crime" imprint of Vertigo, itself the adult imprint of DC Comics, with it no surprise I think that its author Christos N. Gage was once a writer for the Law & Order franchise; because to be frank, this slim volume comes off as the laziest episode of Law & Order ever written, with Gage apparently never meeting a single cliche from this genre he didn't love, in this case based around a concept that even sounds like an idea from the wackier end of Law & Order, like when they tackle Satan worshippers or online pornographers. (Here, it's a serial killer who's obsessed with "trepenation," the ancient act of drilling a hole into a person's skull in an attempt to release their mystical "third eye." Complete with shocking twist ending!) It's fine for a 14-year-old, don't get me wrong, and the strong if not workmanlike illustration by Chris Samnee is a welcome diversion; but I have to confess, the older I get, the more bothered I am when such stuff is marketed towards adults as appropriate adult material, when in fact its quality is far, far below what most fans of text-based novels will consider a good read. It should be kept in mind before picking it up yourself.

Out of 10: 6.7 ( )