By Dustin Cabeal

The cover for Lackadaisy screams vibrant, colorful, exciting story inside. It was the reason I wanted to read the story. As the saying goes, don’t judge a book by it’s cover. Usually, people use that to talk about a great book with a shitty cover, but in this case it’s a great cover with a shitty book.

I’m going to address the anthropomorphic element first. As a kid, I grew up on cartoons about animal cities doing human things and it was always a favorite genre. The reason they were animals instead of humans was usually to hide the mature themes or to make the violence more palatable to the censors. There was still always this feeling that this story could only exist because of the animals in it. Other than wanting to illustrate cat people, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for the characters to be cats. They’re never acknowledged as being animals and everything they do is human like. They don’t even play with their tails or drink milk, and they keep pigs… so pigs are pigs, but cats are people. Anthropomorphic for the sake of anthropomorphic is fine, but at the very least make it feel as if the story could only exist in this form, which is not something Lackadaisy manages to do.

The story for Lackadaisy is a boilerplate prohibition plotline. I know that’s not what any creator wants to hear and I’m sure creator Tracy J. Butler is not thrilled either, but for the glory of that beautiful cover… not much beauty or originality makes its way inside.

Sadly, the characters lack charm, development or even pacing to get to know them. Our main character is unlikable and that seems to be his only personality trait. We’re introduced to so many characters without any real distinction that they end up just being cat people in suits. The story follows a bootlegger with no real skill at bootlegging, trying to procure booze during the prohibition for his struggling employer who he’s in love with. It really doesn’t come across as love until he’s heart broken at the end of the story, but that too lacked buildup, payoff, or substance.

Rocky, the main character, is a name I had to look up in the character drawings at the back of the book. If he’s called by his name in the story I honestly don’t know. I never caught it. He’s called “Ducky” once and so I just thought that was his name since even he didn’t correct the character calling him that. Rocky is an idiot. He’s unlikable, he’s annoying to everyone in the story and especially to the reader. I didn’t root for him and actively wanted him to fail at his tasks. He manages to set off a war between his boss and pig farmers working for a mob. That’s the gist, he makes bad decisions constantly and everyone else is forced to pay for them.

There are plenty of action sequences, but the art cuts away from anything of substance. We see the aftermath more than the action. There are so many pages of people running away from gun fire, but when one “badass” character takes down a garage of guys we just see bodies on a floor. While the art is detailed, it’s not colored like the cover. Instead, Tracy J. Butler, either out of necessity or choice, has colored everything golden brown. I have seen plenty of comics choose to do this style and it’s never been successful in my opinion. The details are washed out by the fact that the entire page is one color tone. Whereas if it was black and white the details can be layered and used to pop out from the page. Instead, everything ends up looking mundane, similar, and brown.

Going back to the story, it’s hard to even say that Rocky is the main character. This is more of an ensemble cast. It lacks focus because of that, never building any of the characters and instead too focused on giving each character their role in moving the plot forward. Elements are added to the story that seem to be there for future volumes but are clumsy in their introduction here. There is also a lot of history that the characters focus on as some kind of driving force behind their decisions, but they hold no weight with the story. If the story focuses on what it’s not showing me then it makes what’s being read less important to the plot.

This is the type of book most reviewers want to avoid. It’s not fun to bag on a book like this. Clearly there’s a lot of love that went into creating it, but there needed to be someone else to reign in the different elements. That and unless you’re going to reinvent the prohibition genre, why even bother telling another story in this setting? There’s nothing that hasn’t been done or done better for this genre and simply having them be cats didn’t check those boxes. For some people the art will be enough. For others they may not have read a prohibition story before and so it’ll pass for them. All this is to say that some people will like this story, for a short period of time. As their tastes and exposure to similar material develops, that’s when they’ll start to see Lackadiasy’s weaknesses, to which there are many. While this is not the type of review I like to write, it’s one that I feel is important to do. To warn others that a pretty cover, with a well-designed cat in a suit is the best part of this book and not to continue any further.