Stuck in a small town, a group of kids look anywhere
for escape. Sometimes this escape is the
hyper violent fantasy of daydreams of war and conquest and sometimes it is
casual cruelty. When this leads to the a
series of turtles being tortured, one girl vows to find the culprits leading to
a spiraling series of events that will tear apart siblings, bring together
friends, and lead to a final confrontation years later that could save or doom
them all.
This is a bizarre and brutally accurate look at the
horrors of the average adolescence.
Boredom, apathy, cruelty, isolation, loneliness, confusion, and sadness
are all commonplace and unchanging.
Powell is an amazing artist and storyteller. His Swallow
Me Whole is an equally frightening look at the dark side of adolescence and
his artwork on The Silence of Our Friends
is equally stunning. For the first 90%
of this book I was thinking it might just be his masterpiece. It’s powerful, honest, and raw and pushes the
story slowly, but very well.
Unfortunately, the last pages introduce an inexplicable twist from
realism to a science fiction parable that ends without a resolution and left me
looking back many times to see if I lost some pages that would make any sense
of it. And then the story sort of just
ends. It’s all very avant garde and
surreal and very confusing. I found the
sudden surreal ending of Swallow Me Whole much more fitting and actually
understandable, so this one does disappoint a bit with the ending. However, there is a lot that does work with Any Empire and some readers may like the
pure weirdness of the ending. I
definitely recommend it for fans of comics as a true artistic medium, just not
as enthusiastically as I recommended Swallow
Me Whole.
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