This is one of those products I'm never quite sure how to review. It's not awful, I just find it pointless. It's not that it doesn't have a market, I just don't know what it is. It's something that exists in a sort of mediocre limbo that leaves you with questions and no real passion about having them answered.
First, 'Apollo' isn't a comic, it's an illustrated prose story, a reimagined origin for the gods Apollo and Artemis, told as a demigod hero myth. With Cthulhu.
See, that's what gets me about this project, that's about all this book contains, a dry retelling of a Greek myth with superficial inclusions of Cthulhu mythology. We get the Necronomicon, an allusion to 'At the Mountains of Madness', and of course the Internet's favorite mascot, Cthulhu, as a stand in for Louis Leterrier's Kraken. It doesn't have any poetic quality at all, at one point the author feels he needs to explain to his audience what a lute is, and the story doesn't do anything interesting or clever with the mash-up. So why does this exist?
The art is passable, even attractive occasionally, but does nothing new with any of the visuals, not even taking a new swing at the infinite possibilities of Cthulhu's mug, presumably because they wanted their audience to know exactly who they were looking at so they could encourage a novelty purchase. The art is the better part of this book, but still far from enough to warrant a purchase without a good story to go with it.
I think the biggest question of all is who was this intended for? It doesn't add to or interpret either mythology with any degree of creativity so true fans of either will probably be as inoffensively bored as I was paging through it. Perhaps the legion of Tumblr bloggers who use Cthulhu as a sort of creative placeholder might enjoy it, but it's too straight forward and bland to evoke squee.
The reason we revisit old stories is either because people like the same old thing over and over again and that is easy money or because due to time, artistic vision, or philosophy we have found a new reason to tell those stories. What do you do with a retelling that doesn't do either?
Score: 1/5
Writer: Erik von Wodtke Artist: Douglas A. Sirois Publisher: Markosia Price: $3.99 Website