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Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The Wrenchies Way Too Much Time Travel For Me

 The Wrenchies

The concept of traveling to other dimensions and time travel and dystopian futures and gang fights... oh my, usually has me reveling in glee. Damn, that could have been the name of this web-site of Things To Do In LA, if TTDILA wasn't as catchy. The Wrenchies covers all those subjects in an annoying manners as though someone is drifting through a nightmare or a dream. The art of a punk underground comic with water colors doesn't make it break the mold and the short little cuts of what the insides of certain bases and hide-outs look like has me guessing the writer/artist Farel Dalrymple got bored with his own work while writing it.

The storys format has many turns all linking together with multiple stories coming together. When this happens in other media, when better thought out, the results can be amazing. In this book it just gets crowded with characters that are disposable with a whim of the author writing them off.

We're first introduced to two brothers fighting a weird zombie creature in a cave, we switch over to a dystopian future with gangs of children. The toughest of the gang is The Wrenchies. We follow them on their dystopian adventure, and just a book about them would have been endearing. Instead, we get transported to a modern day city with a kid who think he's a super hero. He crosses over to the future/other dimension of the Wrenchies. There's also a comic book team called the Wrenchies that both super hero boy and kid gang Wrenchies find. This new Wrenchies team bands together to stop the crisis on Earth that has left the world barren, save for children and weird monsters and men controlled by bugs inside of them.

That plot for most would get you engaged. Instead, the story flops around from those encounters and sums up what happens more than once. The awful floating between dreams sections leave you more annoyed than enthralled as the action or story is cut by the fact everything going on is being remembered by one of the brothers at the beginning of the story who was turned evil or will turn evil.

It does get a bit confusing.

There was enough of a story with just a dsytopian gang of children and the author tried to push beyond that and failed to be entertaining. He created a mess of a story that he himself let go with characters being killed off in a mere sentence or bubble, which he may have thought as funny.

The Wrenchies is more of a mess than a story, if the artist let a writer in to take some of the story and focused it better it may have saved the book. This book was too much ego on the part of an artist who created seconds of stories and abruptly ends them for a mess.