Name: Black River
ISBN: 9781606998335

Josh Simmons

Josh Simmons returns with his first full-length graphic novel since 2007’s acclaimed House. A group of women, one man, and two dogs are making their way through a post-apocalyptic world in search of a city that supposedly still has electricity and some sort of civilization. Along the way, they go to a comedy club, take a drug called Gumdrop, and encounter gangs of men who are either fools, lunatics, or murderous sadists. In other words, all manner of terrors.

Black River

Dimitris Papastergiou

A bunch of women, one man and two dogs walk into an apocalyptic world trying to find a safe place that's been around to finally relax and have a life... but things are going from bad to worse.

Even though it mostly has great reviews, I saw a couple of bad ones, people saying it's got no point and it uses disturbing scenes and violent ones for the sake of shock value. Well, I had no problem with all of that, but it's true. There was no reason for anything to happen. One could argue that, hello, this is an apocalyptic world, of course there's no reason for anything to happen, people went nuts after the apocalypse so, there you go. Here comes the BUT...

You can't have a group of people wandering around and not make any character development. I honestly didn't care of any of the people in the group, I wasn't shocked by anything and wasn't surprised at all by any scene or something. It was simply random people walking and trying to survive. Nothing else happening in it. I liked the scenes. The way this world was built was something ok. I liked the action scenes too. The characters were one dimensional, easy to figure out and nothing about them made them unique, any of them. And no, you can't give me a character who's only speaking one word throughout the book which is a combination of two curse words and call it "unique" or funny. It was irritating if nothing.

I had no problem with the artwork though. It's a gritty B&W kinda cartoon-y artwork and it's something different from what I'm used to. I liked that it wasn't clear and super detail-y. It had its moments. But story-wise, the whole plot didn't help at all. People were dying just for the story to continue and to finally end for no reason other than that the story needed to end. It seemed like the whole plot was running to the end just to be done with the story. If I'm not making any sense, don't worry, the story doesn't make any sense either.

Maybe some people will like it, but I'd recommend something like the Walking Dead or a bunch of other post-apocalyptic stories before I think of recommending this one.

Tiffany Robinson

I didn't care for the artwork or the story. Never really got to know the characters and it never seemed to go anywhere. I was bored all the way through.