Brian Wood has fostered a reputation as a counter-culture comic creator. More Abbie Hoffman than R. Crumb, Wood seems to be interested in what happens after society has gotten out of the way of human nature. He has explored this with the excellent DMZ, which featured a new civil war, and in a slightly roundabout way with Channel Zero, where the characters willfully ignored a corrupt and broken society. Now, in The Massive, he shows what happens when the Earth has destroyed society as we know it.

I will now lightly spoil the SETTING of this comic!

MINOR SPOILERS

After a series of natural disasters has wrecked the planet, society, and the ecosystems of the world, a group of environmental activists tries to figure out what to do next.

As this is the first book in a wholly new series, this issue does some light storytelling with an emphasis on introducing us to a few of the characters and the world we will now inhabit. As such, the judgments I make are a little broader than you might get in a book where we already have a relationship with the characters. In a cliché, I liked this book. The characters were interesting and seemed to be approaching the few situations I saw from several angles apiece. The premise was really cool, although, I must confess that I am a bit of a sucker for a mild apocalypse tale. The writing is impressive, smoothly bouncing between flashbacks and the present while maintaining dramatic tension in each. I also like the art here. There isn’t anything too in-your-face about it, which has been Wood’s tendency in the past, and it really serves the story well.

All in all, I liked this book a lot and I look forward to seeing where this story takes me.

Four and a half raging tsunamis out of five.