Strike two for Wildstorm's "Eye of the Storm" line comes, unsurprisingly, with incomprehensible artwork by Ashley Wood and a script that veers between pretentious and nonsensical by Joe Casey on Automatic Kafka. If you liked Vertigo's Doom Patrol but wished that it could be a little more hard to understand, this might be the book for you. Reading this work is the closest thing to working as a codebreaker that I think I will ever experience, as the creators invite us to guess what the shapes might indicate, who the characters might be and what might be going on.
There are those who are enormous Ashley Wood fans, and I can understand that, as his work does have a sort of visceral appeal, but I don't understand how anyone could tell me with a straight face that he should be doing comics. I'm a fan of Bill Sienkiewicz, whose work has similarities to Wood, but I prefer that the bizarre anatomy and strange imagery be matched by a storytelling ability that Wood just does not seem to possess. In fairness, Automatic Kafka is the most easily-followed of any of his work so far, but I still defy you to tell me exactly what is going on in most of the pages. I'm also not entirely sure why the book needed to have so many naked women, unless the creators were just trying to earn that mature readers label.
Mind you, Wood was probably a good choice for this particular story, as the plot doesn't make much sense either. From what publicity materials I've read and what I'm able to glean from the story, I gather that it is about a retired super-hero taking some sort of super-drugs and experiencing either massive hallucinations or the afterlife, or perhaps a bit of both. The story reads more like a bad acid trip than any kind of compelling narrative, and it seems to be trying way too hard to impress upon the reader how "out there" it is. If anything, Automatic Kafka serves as an example of why only Grant Morrison should try to write like Grant Morrison.
In the closing page of this book, the creators offer up a "Why You Should/Shouldn't Be Reading this Comic Book." I assume it is meant to be amusing and maybe to pre-emptively insult the intelligence of those who would dislike the book by implying that they just don't "get it." But in this humorous "Shouldn't" section there's a paragraph that basically summarizes the book's formula, including "Add an obtuse script and twenty-two pages of murky, obscure artwork and you've got a recipe for disaster. And let's not forget The Million Dollar Detail... complete nonsense." That pretty much hits the nail on the head for me, and is a better description of the book than anything I read in promo material or interviews.
Maybe what comics need to be considered a more legitimate artform is the equivalent of dada paintings and modern art, where there's no real story but instead a vague set of impressions left by the creative team. If that's the case, Automatic Kafka should fill this void nicely, as it does stand up as something of a pretty art-object. It is for those who like Art with a capital A, or maybe for those who enjoy jigsaw puzzles... but I don't think it's really for me.
