Patricia

I’ve been keeping track of the Mercy Thompson comics since I first encountered “Homecoming” back in 2008. The artwork by Francis Tsai sold me on that issue and kept me dialed in to the character. Since then, however, it’s been a tough go for Mercy Thompson and crew, at least as far as comics are concerned. That “Homecoming” series was plagued by delays and then the license somehow migrated to Dynamite. Dynamite put out a single-issue story a little while back that underwhelmed me, but they came back quickly with another offering. This series is an adaptation of the first of the Mercy Thompson novels by Patricia Briggs, and it does a decent job of introducing a number of the characters and concepts surrounding Briggs’ leading lady. Lawrence fleshes out the scenes from Briggs’ story, choosing to use dialog boxes for scene transitions and allowing the reader to peek into Mercy’s thoughts. The story is heavily narrated through the copious caption boxes floating all over this issue. Th

This is, hands down, the worst comic book not bearing a “Titans” logo that I have read in my time as a reviewer here at Comic Book Resources. I enjoyed the Patricia Briggs’ “Mercy Thompson” series that came out a little while back, but this is no “Mercy Thompson.” The story is both flimsy and scattered. I can appreciate the complexities of translating a property from one medium to another. I imagine this is more complex with the transition from novels to comics as the writer must compress hundreds of pages into dozens, but in this case the story just ends up disjointed and largely unreadable. The most interesting segment of the issue is the part focused on Walter Rice, the Vietnam vet who thwarts a werewolf attack. The art, by Jordan Gunderson, is underdeveloped and overcolored, which comes across as just bad. Too many of the scenes are set as atmospheric shots, with small, indistinguishable figures in large, mostly empty spaces. This could (and should) have been played up for effe