BRZRKR vol. 2

Call me a glutton for punishment, but I decided to pick up the second volume of this series.  Vol. 1 of Keanu Reeves’ first comic, with Matt Kindt doing the actual heavy lifting as the writer and Ron Garney providing the art, didn’t impress me.  It came off as a very self-serious story of the world’s oldest and greatest warrior looking for a way to die without any real surprises in terms of the writing or its incredibly violent spectacle.  Vol. 2 doesn’t retroactively make any of that better, but it at least has the decency to get weirder as it advances its main plot.

The thrust of the series is that its main character, B, or Unute to his friends, is looking for a way to live as a normal person.  After eighty thousand years of war, violence, death, and destruction – with the occasional spot of romance or tranquility – he’s had enough and wants to know what it’ll be like to have a finite lifespan.  The U.S. government has offered to find a way to make this happen and until they do, B will do the kind of work he’s best at for them.

Surprisingly, the government is actually making good on this promise and that’s where the weirdness starts.  There’s a framing device involving B in a box with a countdown that links all four issues of this volume, which is all part of a plan to connect him to someone very close to the man.  Not that the man overseeing this is worried about losing contact with the man as they’ve built a kind of “radio” to keep in touch with him.  This is in addition to all of the government-sanctioned weirdness that the overseer is keeping in his basement.  It’s all strange in a way that I wasn’t expecting from this series based on its first volume.  While it’s not quite enough to lift this series into “Actually Good” territory, it’s enough to convince me to check out the next volume to see how it all ends.