Is It Good? The Memory Collectors #1 Review

Every day, in meetings all around the world great sounding ideas are born. Some of the ideas are comic book pitches. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a bunch of hot goth chicks dress up in shiny leather and kill some kind of confusing, memory stealing monster?” I mean, I guess someone thought that was a good idea. But what makes a good sounding idea a great actual product is execution. Does this idea follow through in execution? Is it good?

The Memory Collectors #1 (IDW Publishing)

Right from the get-go you can tell what kind of book this is going to be: a dark, gritty, kind of wild book. Sounds good, right? Wrong. Starting with the first page and continuing throughout the entire issue this book is plagued with cheesy dialogue that is trying to be somehow symbolic or containing inner meaning. After we trudge through an entire scene of that skin-crawlingly terrible monologue on top of a boring, predictable fight scene we are forced to endure two pages of prose that are so poorly written I would not be surprised if the author was a third grader.

And it’s not like those two long, poorly written pages are even that necessary to the story. We learn an origin story of a character we care little about and the origin itself isn’t at all interesting or deep. But I can understand what the author was trying to do here, and it’s not all that bad of a concept. Instead of having to write several comics showing a detailed and complex origin story he is instead cramming that all into two pages of prose. Could have worked fine if the writing was decent, but as I said the writing was stiff and super boring.

Once I finally find myself on the other side of the prison that was the two non-comic pages I get a little more actual comic. And once I am actually starting to warm up to the story…BAM! Another two prose pages! These ones are no better than the first pair but at least tell a more exciting story. It is kind of lazy writing, however, because what was summed up in these pages was nothing more than a couple of women training, something that is easily translated into drawing.

1.5

• The art is quite impressive

• So much prose!
• Writer can’t write
• Story progression, what’s that?

The rest of the comic is just sort of nothing, wrapping up the fight started in the beginning of the comic. Overall, this is a weak and uninspired piece of art. The storytelling is questionable, although I do think it is noble of the writer to be taking risks and mixing mediums. I think that the artwork in this issue was pretty great all around and really set the perfect tone. The only thing I didn’t like was it was so goddamn depressing, but I guess that’s the feeling they wanted to convey.

Is it Good?

No. This isn’t worth your time, to be honest. It might seem a cool concept to some but the execution and story are just so terrible that the concept doesn’t matter.