The Good
Man, this book is weird and hard to follow, and that's what I find most intriguing about it. In this issue, we get to see rapper W-2 (whose name constantly reminds me tax season is coming up) try and work on a screenplay with Sonia Bjornquist, another screenwriter. On top of all of that, there's a man in space returning to Earth from a trip to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons.
This book was pretty hard to follow. So why is it in the good section? I found a lot of the fun in this book is piecing things together for yourself. Sure, by the end of the issue, there are still tons of questions I had about what is going on, but this book isn't chaotic just to be chaotic. There's an underlying method to its madness and you can feel it throughout the story. There's a lot of stories going on at once in this issue and only W-2 and Sonia intertwine. What we have here is a pretty cool looking puzzle, spread out across the floor.
Writer Ales Kot has a very cool, distinct style. He has these great sections of dialogue that can really suck you in. This is laced in with a lot of captioning. The scenes featuring the astronaut rely heavily on the captioning. The captioning has a great flow to it and moves the reader through the story pretty well. There's a lot of great description of the world within the captioning as well.
The opening pages of this issue, artwise, are insanely cool. Artist Morgan Jeske's first two pages are these very surreal and eye popping. It looks much more like a painting than a panel in a comic book. There's great use of color there, and a small part of me wishes the whole book was done like this just to add to the overall weirdness of the issue. Towards the end of the issue, the action is a chaotic and the paneling. I thought the two ideas complimented each other extremely well.
The Bad
While I always enjoying going into a book knowing little-to-nothing about it, I really wish I had read the solicit prior, so I know what I was getting into. This book is incredibly jumpy and very hard to follow. It's something I loved about the book, but at the same time, something I didn't like about it. Also, this type of storytelling isn't something most comic book fans are used to reading.
The Verdict
CHANGE #1 is a weird read, but an interesting one at that. Sure, it's tough to understand what's going on because the book is a bit all over the place, but I was strangely drawn to it just to see what happens next. I liked Ales Kot's use of caption boxes here as well as his dialogue, and Morgan Jeske's opening pages were beautiful and insanely memorable.
It's weird. It's confusing. It's odd. However, I really enjoyed CHANGE. I highly recommend picking this one up and giving it a shot.