Quantum Mortis: A Man Disrupted by Vox Day, Steve Rzasa art by Matvei Daniilovich

Quantum Mortis: A Man Dusrupted by Vox Day and Steve Rzasa with art by Matvei Daniilovich.

Quantum Mortis Cover

Quantum Mortis might better be titled Quantum Mortis: The Actionless Comic. To see why, let's start with the cover which depicts a man and a woman atop a skyscraper with even taller skyscrapers behind them. The man is standing with two weapons, one in each hand. He is looking down the left side of the building shooting with the weapon in his left hand while his right hand is pointing outward at seemingly nothing. The woman looks almost like she's kneeling but in fact is standing like a human accordion. She appears to be looking at the person looking at the comic book cover, she has a weapon in her right hand pointed up while her left hand is making some bizarre hand sign the crosses the male character's knees.

This is one case where the cover tells you almost exactly what you can expect to find on the inside. These two characters and very little else.

The big name on this book is a writer named Vox Day. He is one of those people you have probably heard of but know very little about. Apparently he has something to do with the Alt-Right. What is the Alt-Right? In a nutshell, big government Progressives who want what is called an "ethnostate." What an "ethnostate" is, is beyond the scope of this review as this comic doesn't really appear to espouse any sort of politics.

So, from what I've heard but am too lazy to research, this book was a kickstarter in response to SJW comic books that have been an especial plague on long suffering comic book readers since the end of 2015? It may have started before that, but in the last three years it had come to a head with Marvel comics replacing long loved and billion dollar box office successes with "diversity." What is "diversity?" In terms of George Orwell's 1984, it is "duck speak, which is a way of forming language so that nothing meaningful or thoughtful can be conveyed. "Diversity" is a way of ensuring that nobody thinks and that those who might are immediately and properly shamed then shunned for it. But again, I am off in the weeds.

So, as I have already stated, there is really no politics in this book. Or, if there is, it is so subtle as to go undetected by the average  reader (me).

Thus, having defined what isn't, let's seek to divine what it is:

The Man Who Is Disrupted. Do you look at this and think "lighting!"?

We've already started with the cover so lets continue with the subtitle, A Man Disrupted. This subtitle refers to a character that is murdered prior to the start of the book, mostly disintegrated by a disruptor weapon. I think it is supposed to be a mystery set on a planet that human colonize somewhere around 2999? It's not really important because this book isn't really a murder mystery either. But we can divine from the subtitle that perhaps that is what it is meant to be.

The main male character is named Tower. I found this confusing because the jargon of the book is so thick, whether is is endlessly talking about military and civilian law codes or estimating time in kiloseconds and hectoseconds that when I first saw his name, I thought Tower was who he was communicating with, or telling his computer, named Baby, to communicate with.

I swear I did not see this traffic until I started taking screens for this review

The book starts with Tower flying around what looks like a mostly empty mega city. The city looks like something out of the Incal or The Fifth Element except it doesn't have any people in it. And you have to look very, very closely to see the dense traffic, especially since reading all the words in the word bubbles takes most of the reader's attention, and sometimes the word bubbles take over panels, even pages, at a time.

Some of the very few people you see in this densely populated city

His computer is alerting him to a murder. "Why?" he asks, "That's a police matter." Turns out he forgot he asked Baby to keep track of any cases that a female officer named Hildreth is assigned to. But she won't be able to get to the crime scene for 8 kiloseconds. 8 kiloseconds. That's like more than two hours!

Here are some flying cars! Just like Incal or The Fifth Element! Exciting!

 First of all, why are you telling time in kiloseconds? I've always had trouble with time in sci-fi stories set in space because time, as we know it, is a function of the planet we are living on. A Martian year is nearly 2 earth years. A Mercurial year is 88 earth days. So, time is meaningless in space. Establishing that, when using units of time in a story set on a planet that isn't earth, either use standard earth time or just make something up that has no relation to time as we know it on earth.

A few more people you can see if you look very, very closely.

But at any rate, Tower lands near to scene of the murder where we see a few more people, one outside, most behind the glass of a coffee shop or something. There's a cute green alien monkey there who doesn't speak the standard language, whatever that is, so we get a word bubble full of gibberish, was I meant to read this gibberish? Because I tried. But then I wondered why I didn't just skip to the next panel? So the space monkey is speaking into a thing that translates his words so that Tower can understand them. Why not just do it all in one step? Show the space monkey talking into the translator and show the translated text. Otherwise it's pointless. Is this a real language the authors worked out and are proud of? Well, it doesn't add to the story in the comic book so dump it.

Cute space monkey spouting gibberish into a translator.

In fact, very little adds to the story as told by the comic book. So eventually the little green space monkey vanishes and we still have several pages until we get to the arrival of our second main character, on offense to the computer voice in Tower's head.

So while we wait for Hildreth to make her appearance, Tower contemplates if lightning could have killed the man who's remains are mostly a sort of ashen mush. Lightning in a culture that has disruptor weapons that can disintegrate a person. Lightning doesn't work like that on earth and if it works like that on whatever planet this is....Arrrgh!

That takes us to chapter 2, which opens with a block of words giving the legal definition of space murder! Exciting, and we still have two pages of Tower talking to his computer and as Hildreth lands he pops a space Tic Tac.

Why not pop a mint while waiting for the hot space cop to put in her appearance?

Finally, the second person on the cover appears and as she gets out of her flying car she puts her hair in a ponytail to create a pin-up pose. But why didn't she have her hair in a ponytail when she was driving her flying car? I don't think she was wearing a helmet. Tower wasn't wearing a helmet. It's just so they can have her in this pose.

Here's Hildreth! Apparently she likes her hair to fly free while she's driving her flying car.

So finally, Hildreth is here! Can we start the story? Well, no. But we do get the most action seen in this book to day, the attack of the word bubbles! I've included some samples below with the actual words edited out.

Watch out guys! You're about to be attacked by word bubbles!

Oh My God! Hildreth! They've got you!

They keep coming and coming and coming! But at least we find out who the dead guy is, right?

So after the word bubbles attack and try to massacre our two heroes before any more of this comic can go on, we find out who our Disrupted Man is. And we get the best art in the book thus far. I'm not saying it's good but it looks like something that belongs in a comic book. Maybe Prince Valiant?

Well, it's too bad for our Disrupted Man that he died but now that we know he is royalty, Tower can take the case because it clearly falls within military jurisdiction.

The best artwork in the book tells the story of an exiled royal family in one page.

Except he wants to hang out with Hildy some more so he concocts a way for her to keep the case. At this point, the word bubbles have given up the fight and returned to a more manageable number.

The story ends with Hildreth saying she will go back to her office to officially request Tower's help on the case. Oh, and her computer implant flirts with Tower. Or something.

29 pages of non-story and weak, unconvincing art.

So, then, having tried to divine what this book is I can only come to the conclusion that it is a wordy, sterile exercise in proving anybody can fund an independent comic book via Kickstarter. Let's all get started!