Boy, can I relate. No Dead Time follows the lives of two main characters, one an office monkey and the other a retail clerk, and having spent most of my work time in one or the other of those jobs, I've got to say that McLachlan captures a lot of the frustration that comes with working them. It also explores the notion of how much power corporations have and how they wield it through advertising and how difficult it is to find someone to spend life with if you really aren't willing to compromise yourself to do it. I find myself agreeing with most of the points that McLachlan makes here, but I also found that in making a lot of these points, he creates a loose, free-flowing story that sort of meanders around a bit too much at times. I really enjoyed the moment-to-moment writing, and I loved the artwork, but I never really cared all that much about what happened to the characters, and that lack of emotional investment in the story hurt the book for me.
We all think things we would never say, or at least we think things that we won't say to certain people. McLachlan's characters do not have this trouble, and seem to say everything they think as if they are in a college discussion group instead of living in real life. The resulting characters are entertainingly frank and more intelligent than 90% of the people you're going to meet on the street, but if you met them at a party you'd probably quietly excuse yourself and think they were being jerks, and meeting them in the pages of a comic doesn't make them much more likable than that. I agree with much of what Seth and Nozomi, our two leads, believe, but they're so damned smug about everything that I wind up disliking them anyway. Which would be fine, if that were the point, but the point seems to be that we're reading a great romantic story, and I just don't really buy into it.
However, while the characters and thus the central plotline don't really work for me, a lot of the book still does. The central theme of the book seems to be that people are morons, and poor Seth and Nozomi have to struggle with dealing them. At work, they're the customers and co-workers who behave selfishly or stupidly, and aren't even smart enough to realize when sarcasm is being directed at them. At parties, they're other party goers who can't be bothered to look beyond the surface of the people they're talking to. McLachlan perfectly captures the special kind of hell that many intelligent people face at boring 9 to 5 jobs, monotonous retail jobs, hellish frat parties and office get-togethers. If only he were so convincing at selling the happy moments of life as well as the ugly ones, the story might have connected with me more, but McLachlan only lets the main characters truly experience any happiness by the end, at which point I was pretty well convinced neither one of them could actually stay happy for five minutes so they were probably doomed anyway.
If the story of No Dead Time didn't quite connect with me, though, the artwork certainly did. I've previously enjoyed Tom Williams' work on Misa, Looking At the Front Door and Panel, all small press efforts that probably not a lot of folks have seen. No Dead Time should be a step up for him, exposure-wise, and he definitely deserves it. Williams has a unique, exaggerated style, drawing stylized characters that could only have come from his pen, much like a Scott Morse or Jim Mahfood. Though the story of No Dead Time is a slice-of-life affair, Williams presents the characters as humanized animals (a worm for a pretentious jerk, apes for frat boy jocks) or as other unusual creatures (a scarecrow/snowman hybrid with dreads for Seth's best friend, a bat-winged horned woman for Nozomi's) and gives the whole thing an unreal look. These characters express their inner personalities through their inhuman facades, and Williams does an excellent job of conveying these unusual visuals without dragging the whole book out of reality to do it.
All told, I enjoyed No Dead Time, and even the arrogance of the leads is something that I can see as kind of charming. Certainly the "Record Store Bingo" page at the end endeared the book to me, as we came up with the same sort of thing about two months ago at the comics shop where I work, so it's clear that McLachlan is coming from a place that I can totally relate to. And certainly, the artwork is a dream, and has reminded me to put Williams's name on my must-watch list for future projects, especially as I'm embarrassed to recall that I didn't recognize it right off when I did the Down the Line write-up for this book. However, there's a preachy element to be found here, a certain moral superiority, that makes the book difficult to approach even if you agree with the cast's principles, and might make it downright impossible if Gap ads and the food at McDonald's don't particularly bother you. 7/10
