Publisher: Vertigo
Pictures and words: Matt Kindt
Reviewer: Rod Nunley
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So the story goes like this.  There’s this everyday normal guy working a dead end job. He’s living a dead end life. Then one morning he wakes up in a parallel world where all the things Fox News has been screaming are about to happen … start to actually happen.  Planes are falling from the sky into homes.  Flu Pandemics sweep the globe.  A dirty bomb takes out the entire city of Seattle.

Our hero wakes up the next day back in his original reality.  The sudden shift from dealing with the end of the world to being expected to have an opinion about the color of a new couch is a lot to handle.

And each morning brings another switch.  He’s pulled back and forth between the two realities.  Soon he discovers that there’s a way to use information learned in one world to help in another world. Learning about the dark connection between the two worlds as he learns what kind of man he really is.

Matt Kindt is the writer/artist that brings this story to life in this new original hardcover graphic novel from Vertigo.

I picked this book up on the ever growing word of mouth around the internet.  I love the end of the world genre of stories.  What I expected when I picked up this book was not what I got.  I was expecting something a little more escapist.  I think most survival or post apocalyptic fare falls into this trap far too often.  Focusing far too much on the clever setting they have concocted and not enough on the impact on the people who inhabit the world.

Instead of a just a survival story with sci-fi elements what I found was also an emotional examination of what it means when you come face to face with what kind of person you’re capable of being.  With each day shifting back to a normal existence our main character can’t just move forward without thinking about what he has to do to survive.  One moment he’s looting and fighting and even killing to survive and the next he’s trying to be polite around his girlfriend’s parents for dinner.

I was taken back by the examination of not only who we are but how the things that we own can block us off from what really matters in life.

Kindt’s book is a revelation.

His art handles a complicated plot line with ease and style.  The running ticker of news at the bottom of each page accentuates the constant buzz of information that we see our lives filled with.  At the end of the book I was compelled to keep the computer turned off and the distractions to a minimum for a while.

And I think that sort of introspection might actually be this books strongest achievement.