By Hunter T. Patrick

Never judge a book by its cover. I read this going off of how wonderful the cover was. After reading, I had one word I could not wait to type. Finally. I finally finished this godawful book. The art looks cool, and it is not the best. The story is intriguing enough. The writing was groan-inducing. The dialogue is from animals such as monkey, so you would expect monkeys to say all this, but it went overboard, and I had to endure the word ‘poop’ about twice every other page. The easy part of this review is what went wrong, so let me state what worked first.

The plot was intriguing. I mean flying monkeys and a post-apocalyptic world? Only the latter half of that is overdone in media. The story itself has merit (sadly it is the dialogue that weighs it down). As for the art, it looked so cool on the cover, but the art loses merit fast. If this were just a painting, I would be amazed with the scenery, but sadly once I got used to this did I just lose interest in it overall. This is an all-ages title, this might be an excuse for some readers to go easy on a title, but this is a book with work done by a better than average (for all-ages) artist, and even published by Image Comics. There is no excuse for the bad to outweigh the good (which I already summarized the good, believe it or not).

This was a massive chore to read any one issue. Maybe this was because I read it all in an attempted one go. If I read it presumably monthly as I expected was its schedule maybe it would not have been as bad, but I would rather get it over with. A good example I can think of is Christopher Priest’s Justice League run. I read it out of obligation and wanted it so badly to be good and chose for myself to read it, but even one issue every other week was way too much for the series. I wanted Angelic to be good when I began reading, I would not have reviewed it otherwise, but sadly I was mistaken by its cover.

Who is this book for? I find it hard imagining children for all-ages to be attracted by an Image book. I am not too familiar with all-age titles by Image, nor have I ever even heard of one. That is to say, I cannot imagine an audience already in place. Older readers may be attracted by a new Image title but cannot recommend this title to peers for the poor writing, and I cannot imagine them giving this to someone younger to read. It is great when the industry tries to cater to various readers, but this is a grand example of when things go wrong. The writing is purposely bad but sadly their attempt at a good attempt at bad writing is a bad attempt at bad writing. This gets a 2/5 because once stripped of the dialogue and only kept with the story and art, that is too good for a 1/5

Score: 2/5

Angelic vol. 1
Image Comics