Review by C.J. Bunce
It helps to know upfront that Scottish comedian and personality Frankie Boyle always wanted to write comics. His inspiration wasn’t from the decades of superhero comics, but Alan Moore, whose attitude, as Boyle sees it, was “that comics had sort of run their course.” A fan of the writing of Ed Brubaker, David Lapham, and Jason Aaron, Boyle embarked on an ambitious project, asking “what sort of comics do you write after comics have been done already?” The result was first published in serial format in Mark Millar’s short-lived CLiNT magazine, and with two new chapters to wrap up his story a complete, graphic novel-length story arrives next week from Titan Comics, called Frankie Boyle’s Rex Royd.
Ambitious is the key word to describe Rex Royd. At its worst, Boyle has touched on Alan Moore’s outrageous depravity as seen in his Lost Girls. At its best, Boyle has created a character that will appeal to fans of the disconnected and dispassionate Dr. Manhattan and the idiosyncratic and self-absorbed Ozymandias in Moore’s acclaimed Watchmen series. With his protagonist, the Lex Luthor-esque supervillain scientist and CEO Rex Royd, Boyle has created a brash reflection of non-mainstream comics in the pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe era. His “hero” is like Ian Fleming’s James Bond if you remove all the tropes that make us actually like Bond, all the fun things that keep us coming back for more and not just dismiss the character as a misogynistic, unexpurgated blunt instrument. Boyle is fully in on this, as his lead female character Eve–as in the biblical partner of Adam–resembles Bond’s confidante Eve Moneypenny in the last two Bond movies.
And yet, Rex Royd—the book–is like a writing experiment. What do we get if we take out all these good elements and swap in the dark outcomes? So it sometimes reads like Neil Gaiman writing a 24-Hour Comic (I’ve read that, this is probably better), but then, as in the ninth and final chapter of the book, we’re surprised with a clever sort of play on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with some Harvey Pekar-inspired attempts at making some meaning of it all. So there’s a lot going on. If you find linearity and deep meaning in the book, well, the joke may be on you, as the author has said when the artists needed some of his script to be explained, his response was, “It’s supposed to be a joke.”
. With such a loaded title, you’d expect the entries to be pretty powerful stuff. You’ll certainly find a broad mix of story and art styles, but ultimately beauty is in the eye of the reader. Does the volume live up to the title?
is a series of titles that was beset with controversy from its inception. Years before the launch of the series last year, DC Comics had looked at a prequel concept for the much-ballyhooed 
mini-series turned graphic novel, but squelched it before anything came of it. 
creator Darwyn Cooke is the visionary of Before Watchmen in the first two books released over the past 8 days, Before Watchmen: Minutemen #1, and Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #1. In Minutemen, he serves as writer and artist, and he shares writing credits on Silk Spectre with Amanda Conner, who also serves as artist on Silk Spectre.
back story.
movie. Nice work so far!
