Tears Have Stained His Cheeks

For seemingly ever the Boston Globe Sunday funnies section has been running a page spread a week from Undertown, created by author Jim Pascoe and artist Jake Myler, published by Tokyopop.

And nearly since the start those pages have struck me as busy, hard to follow, with a cloying edge of melodrama that the actual storytelling didn't do enough to deserve. The characters seemed to draw magical powers and allies out of their back pockets at convenient times, and while a lot of little things happened the story progressed hardly at all.

But maybe, I thought, the problem was that I was seeing snatches of this comic that were too small: too few pages at a time, visually reduced too much. So I picked up the first volume of this series at the library and read it.

And I learned that my first impression was correct.