Review: The Complete Multiple Warheads

The Complete Multiple Warheads by Brandon Graham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Brandon Graham's Multiple Warheads is a tough book to review. What little plot there is follows two "stories". First, there's Sexica (Sex for short) and Nikoli. Sex is an organ smuggler of some kind; she sneaks out of the city and smuggles designer organs back into the city for sale to shady characters. Nik is her boyfriend; he seems to be a shy mechanic. Also he's part werewolf, because she smuggled a werewolf penis into the city and attached it to him, and he became a werewolf (and, yes, the whole book is filled with moments like that). The other story follows a different organ smuggler as she murders her way through a series of increasingly absurd locales in search of a specific target.

Graham's writing is really... unfiltered. This is a book that revels in ribald and perverse humor, puns (and puns and puns), and the absurd. The "stories" don't really follow an arc and none of them are actually resolved. There's a definite stream-of-consciousness feel to the whole thing, as though Graham just started writing down ideas and followed them no matter where they went.

To be blunt, I wasn't really wowed by the writing, here. As it became increasingly clear that the characters weren't actually saying anything important and that a lot of it was just going to be layers upon layers of bad puns and puerile jokes, I found myself skipping over the dialog completely. That skipping the dialog didn't seem to impede my ability to read the book is... not a great sign.

The art, on the other hand, is well worth the price of admission. That's what makes this such a difficult work to evaluate. The writing may be sub-par, but Graham's layouts and designs are brilliant, if absurd. There are moments of real greatness captured in his whimsical drawings. Long shots contain landscapes packed with tiny details that reward close examination.

If you're interested in (or, at least, can get over) Graham's sense of humor (i.e. fart/shit/dick/sex jokes, puns, and more puns) and don't mind cartoon violence and a bit of nudity, this might be worth checking out. As it stands, it wasn't quite my cup of tea, but I did find myself engrossed by some of the amazing and imaginative pages.

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