Peter Milligan. Art by James Romberger. The Bronx Kill. New York: DC Comics, 2010. 181 pages.

It’s book review Friday–this week I’m featuring another book that I got through Amazon Vine.

The “comic book” can be a powerful story-telling medium. Graphic novels like Art Speigelman’s MAUS and Majane Satrapi’s PERSEPOLIS can do things that standard texts cannot, so readers can connect with them on a more emotional level. But THE BRONX KILL, which plays with fictionalized memoir and remembrance, doesn’t come close to delivering on the potential.

The basic idea sounds intriguing: a struggling literary novelist, whose cop father wanted him to to become a cop, finds himself in the middle of a mystery. And the right elements are there–like WATCHMEN, the traditional comics pages are intercut with pages of text from an “in universe” document–in this case, the protagonist’s in-progress novel. It should make for good reading, but it doesn’t.

Basically, that’s because the protagonist, Martin Keane, is almost entirely unlikable. He’s presented in terms of what he’s not: assertive, successful, a “man’s man” like his father. But the reader doesn’t get a real sense of what Martin is, besides the fact that he likes to write and would rather do literary fiction than police procedurals. With nothing invested in the lead, it’s hard to care about what’s happening. Keane just seems like an unpleasant guy who unpleasant things happen to.

The art seems a bit rough, which doesn’t drawn in the reader, but the book’s biggest problem is voice. The comic is intercut with excerpts from the novel in progress, which has some seriously clunky prose. At first I said, “Wow, that’s bad writing,” but then I rationalized that it was supposed to be–Martin is derided as a second-rate author, so maybe the point is to show this rather than just tell it. Still, it’s an awful lot to ask your reader to sit through. But Martin’s dialog in the comics section is equally stilted. I rationalized this as, “well, this just shows that Martin is really stuck in mediocrity–he can’t even speak naturally.” But other characters speak in the same voice. For example, during an emotionally-charged confrontation, a supposedly gruff character says, “It’s a pretty shameful episode in our family history, one best forgotten.” This isn’t the kind of thing someone would yell at someone else during a pitched argument, and it just blows the scene’s credibility out of the water. There’s no sense that these are real people at all, just characters.

Early in the book, a critic pans Martin’s latest book as “portentous, pretentious, and mind-crushingly dull.” I’m not saying that THE BRONX KILL is these things, but I wouldn’t necessary argue with someone who said so. I just found it disappointing.