“By Night, Vol. 1”

“The first half, before the stuff happens, is weird and oddly hard to read. It’s disjointed somehow. Like you’re thrown into the story as it’s already in progress, which people say is good, but you just want people to FEEL like that’s what’s happening, but really what you do is cleverly hide the exposition in between the stuffs happening. This felt like I was in the middle of stuff for real, which means I didn’t really know what was going on, but also I didn’t care.

Then the stuff happens, but here’s what’s weird: The stuff happens, and we see almost none of it. Imagine the Twilight Zone is a doorway. And what you watch isn’t a show about it was Earth all along or whatever, you watch a show about people watching a show about how it was Earth all along. You see them go into a theater, then come out, and they’re like, Whoa, that was a weird one, eh?

What’s even WEIRDER is that the stuff happening outside the Twilight Zone door is better once a couple characters step through the Twilight Zone door. So even though we’re not seeing what happens behind the door, it’s only after we watch the characters go through the door that the story gets any steam.

And this is the truly weird part: The story doesn’t get good BECAUSE the characters went through the door. It just happens to be better and more interesting after it happens.

Maybe it’s because the characters that go through the door (manic pixie dream girl and slightly less manic amateur filmmaker who is really boring and makes you wish she’d just been a maic pixie dream girl) are less fun than the characters on the other side (dopey guy and dopey dad). We temporarily lose the zeros and get with the heroes.

So, I don’t know, I don’t really give a shit about Fantasy Dimension Girls or whatever the original story was. I’m more into Dad and Teen Hang Out Comedy Story In A Warehouse. And I don’t think that’s the story that continues, so this is where I jump off the train. “