“Here’s the thing: If I hand’t already read Ghost in the Wires last year, I think I would have enjoyed this more. It’s a good book, and the art is nice and clean. But the story of the main character, which seems to be cobbled together from different real life hacker stories, pulled a lot from the story of Kevin Mitnick, which is described in detail in Ghost in the Wires.
I’ll also say that some comics seem to have extra stuff in them that’s needlessly icky or cruel, which is a feeling I got in this one. A lot of that kind of work is well-respected, artists like Johnny Ryan or Jim Woodring. Personally, I’m not in love with that kind of stuff, the stuff that feels like it’s in there just to shock the reader instead of being in there because it fits in with the overall story. I don’t know. I’m a very sensitive man.
Finally, DO NOT FLIP THROUGH THIS ONE. There are a handful of big reveals, especially on the last page. I don’t know why I can’t stop myself from doing this. You’d think I would have learned that lesson on Walking Dead vols 1-14, but no. I can’t help myself. It’s like I want a little teaser trailer of what I’m about to read, so I flip, but because this particular trailer has scenes selected at random instead of thoughtfully, and because your eye tends to stop on big splash pages, and because big splash pages are often the big reveals, I find myself spoiling things FOR MYSELF. So rather than flipping through, I’m going to try and commit to reading the first two pages or something. I need a new tactic.”