As I said in my review of Riot Shell, we get all sorts of self-published work submitted for review here at Multiversity Comics, and next on my list was Brett Uren’s Kuzimu. Pitched to us as a “new indie horror/sci
I’m sure our fair readers have heard of the expression “all style, no substance.” That describes this comic quite well. I get the vibe that, yes, creator Brett Uren is well read and rather intelligent, but I feel he gets too wrapped up in trying to show off how intelligent he is that he obscures what is actually trying to be conveyed. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to “get” it, but I found this harder to understand than some of the most difficult prose I’ve had to read. The Mars Volta’s Deloused in the Comatorium storybook was simpler to follow.
Have you ever tried to “read” an unlettered comic? You can typically get an idea of what is going on, without any of the specifics. Once you add in the lettering, you get the whole picture. However, I feel that if you read the first two issues of Kuzimu without lettering, you would get just as much of the story as someone reading the finished copy. The art did much more to tell the story than the captions and dialogue bubbles did, which is sad considering there were oh so many. Even then, the art isn’t by any means exceptional, though it is certainly creative.
As I said, I don’t doubt that Uren is an intelligent person, but if you’re intelligent the best way to convey that is to just write without thinking “how can I show off how smart I am?” Now, it’s probably unlikely that Uren had a thought quite like that, but the comic just seems to reek of trying to hard. Many otherwise intelligent writers have lost what could have been a good story by mistaking complexity for quality, and I feel that’s exactly what happened to Uren. However, there’s definitely something good behind all of this, so I would definitely be willing to check out further work of Uren’s. Just probably not any more Kuzimu.
Final Verdict: 3.8 – Pass
A note: Philosophy isn’t a genre of fiction, despite most good fiction containing philosophical elements. Using it as a genre just sounds a bit pretentious.
