The Fiction has been a very entertaining and enlightening ride, venturing beyond the nostalgic connections one has with their childhood into deeper emotions like regret and isolation. Each of the characters within The Fiction were given a respectable amount of treatment, gradually learning over the four issues the way each of them were dealing with these vast emotions and the influence that the past still had.
The Fiction #3 acts as the boiling point to this pressure cooker of a series, really making a statement as one of the best series that BOOM! Studios have released this year. The play on memory and truth, on understanding and ignorance, of good and evil, are themes that continue to be experimented with through Curt Spires’s imaginative script, David Rubin’s surreal and organic lines, Michael Garland’s atmospheric colours and Colin Bell’s quality lettering to top it all off. It will be exciting to see how it will all end, as much as it will be sad.
The newest issue of The Fiction picks up right where the last one left off with Kassie and Max returning to the fictional reality they ventured into as young kids. Kassie has convinced Max to aid her in the hopes of finding Tyler, one of their childhood friends, who has appeared to be taken from their reality into this fictional one.
One of the great wonders as a young kid is coming across a story, a book, for the first time and completely falling in love with it. It may be the characters, the elaborate setting, or the fantastical elements of said story that keeps you coming back for more. An attachment is born, a link to a certain story that grows over time, allowing you to get lost in another world time and time again. The Fiction #1 takes this concept of the power of imagination within fictional stories to the literal level. What if you were actually transported to the very setting you were reading about and were able to interact with the characters within?
Cullen Bunn is unique. If nothing else can be said about him, he is certainly unique. The Empty Man shows the full extent of Bunn’s ability. The series focuses on two detectives as they struggle to sort out the mystery surrounding a series of suspicious deaths and murders. The deaths are connected by the strange hallucinations experienced by the perpetrators, as well as their last words “The Empty Man made me do it”. The Empty Man is unpredictable because it follows so very few tropes. Nothing like this series has been seen before, and readers will be asking themselves the same question over and over: Who is the Empty Man? (Or “What the F*ck?”).