Noir: A Collection of Crime Comics by Diana SchutzMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Noir: A Collection of Crime Comics is a very thin volume of short crime stories, written by a variety of authors, well known and less well known. As with many anthologies, the results here are a mixed bag. While several of the tales here are pretty traditional pulp stories, most of them add some kind of spin to the genre, for better or worse. Unfortunately, in too many of these tales, the twists and tropes are very easily spotted. A number of the stories contained within have a strong science-fiction bent, which isn't bad, but was decidedly not what I was looking for or expecting from a book called Noir. The end result is a book of stories that are readable, but ultimately forgettable.
While the stories are generally all pretty middle of the road, the artwork is a more varied; with so many different visual styles involved, there's almost bound to be at least one that works for a particular reader. Of course, that also means there's almost certainly a story or two that just don't work.
While this is far from the worst crime comic I've picked up, there's not very much to recommend this. If you're looking for noir or crime comics, there's a lot better fare out there than this.
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