I have a book on my shelf entitled The World According to Mister Rogers, and it’s a book I pull out and read over again every so often when I need to be reminded that the world is not all bad, and we really can try and be good to each other. I know you probably don’t believe me or are laughing, but that’s ok. I mention that book because one of the things that leaps out at me when I read it is how Mr. R would pour over his scripts saying “Simple is better. Simple is better.” It’s a page I’ll take for my reviews from this point on. Simple is better.

I realize, given the trends in comics and the awards that this particular one has achieved that I will be in the minority when I say that I simply didn’t care for this work. I call it a work because, unlike most comics out there, it’s obvious the artist put some thought and time into it to make it something special. It’s also necessary to say that I never was a fan of Mr. POE, either. He struck me much as a characterization I saw once of Frederic Chopin; after being introduced, the composer said (in a voice like Droopy) “I’m Frederic Chopin. I don’t like playing in public, I don’t like people, and I don’t like you.” I may be wrong, but so help me that’s what I think of when I read or read about Mr. Poe. It didn’t help here.

Anyway, back to the review; the reasons are pretty straightforward, I think. For one, the work was frightening, to me, to a degree. It was as though I was drawn into someone’s nightmare; into a world that made very little sense and where anything could happen, and I was trapped there. That’s disorienting to me. Also, I felt as I read it that we were looking into the parts of someone’s soul that really aren’t our business. To paraphrase a line from the movie The Shadow, I know what evil lurks in the hearts of men because I see it in myself. It’s something intensely private to me and I felt uncomfortable seeing what I perceived as some of that darkness/conflict laid out in the comic for us, the readers, to see in the characters. It was an invasion of privacy, from where I was standing, as though someone suddenly took all those things you keep hidden in the dark parts of your heart/mind/soul and put them out for display. Put me right off, so to speak. Some may not understand my reasoning, some will, and I’m all right with that. On the art side of things, the artwork itself seemed a bit hurried - I kept wanting to reach in and erase the squiggly lines to add some more defined ones. The pace of the comic was hard for me to go with as well, akin to being swept along from one shock to another in a very swift river’s current. All in all, not my style.

Having said that, though, does that mean I think it’s a bad comic? I can’t really say that. It wasn’t my kind of comic, and I didn’t really care for it. Aside from the more dark aspects of it, I didn’t really see anything that would make me want to warn people off. Is it a comic I would recommend to others? Not if you were very young or prone to depressive episodes. I do feel, though, that most people would need to read it on their own, and make their own call.

For me, I give it 2 stars. Rating:

The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo
Updates on Saturdays.
http://www.drunkduck.com/The_Surreal_Adventures_of_Edgar_Allan_Poo/index.php
by Dwight L Macpherson
art by Thomas Boatright
lettered by Thomas Mauer

reviewed by The Doctor

(7 votes, average: 2.86 out of 5)

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