Comics Fondle

Insomnia is heavily influenced by movies–Unforgiven and Little Big Man are the most obvious–and it starts with a joke about passing the first ten minutes of a movie off as original material. It’d be really cool if all of Insomnia was just movie tidbits strung together, but I don’t think so. Broersma is a painfully uninteresting writer. When he tries to wrap up Insomnia, with was basically an anthology before, in the last issue, he goes for David Lynch and it comes out real bad. He becomes an obvious and goofy indie comic book guy. Insomnia was never a great innovation, but at least it wasn’t obvious.

The first issue is, overall, the best. It’s an issue-long story with lots of movement and lots of confusion and a lot of good, solid tone. The art’s shaking–Broersma’s coming along–but it shows enthusiasm and it’s genuinely interesting.

In terms of tone, the second issue is the best, because Broersma employs a color scheme. His hand’s getting steadier and it looks real good. Too bad the story is full of dumb flashbacks and an intentionally confounding plot.

The third issue, Broersma’s art has been gentrified. It’s no longer interesting to look at and his story, tying everything together, is bad. There are two or three nice panels, all landscapes. It’s all wheel spinning to fill pages here. I guess he knew, by issue three, Fantagraphics was definitely publishing the book.

Broersma’s a bad, derivative writer–the prologue never ties in to the rest of the story, for example–and all of his connections are contrived. But the art was fairly interesting for the first two issues and kept things going. It’s self-indulgent and uninteresting and rather depressing, since the issues cost eight bucks a piece.

D

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