The Wake

Ambitious comic-book creators who eschew convention and clichés and summon the courage to give readers an epic deserve proper credit…and honest blame should the results fall flat. So it is, with this Eisner Award-winning yet indigestible goulash of borrowings from the aquatic adventure movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The plot concerns the discovery of a mysterious race of sea monsters and the resultant ecological devastation, with half of the action set during the former and the rest occurring 200 years afterward, with flashbacks to the distant past. Think The Abyss meets Leviathan, but readers will get nostalgic for Waterworld as author Snyder keeps bogus dramatics and leaden folklore references coming while failing to develop any characters worth caring about. Murphy's art resembles a grittier, chaotic variant of Kevin O'Neill's work (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).