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If you like your futures gritty as hell with flying cars, jet packs, curvy prostitutes, bloody entrails and decapitations, then City of Dust will be a full course meal.

Review By Cornelius A. Fortune

Though I wouldn’t put this one up against Niles’s previous efforts (namely the underrated Criminal Macabre and the popular 30 Days of Night series), it’s still an interesting trip. And to be fair, there are four more issues left and plenty of time for this to rival his mostly good horror comics.

I’m all for a writer trying out different things and Niles trying his hand at a futuristic setting is a great experiment in form. What works best is the mood, the foreboding spirit of this “Blade Runner’esque” future depicted by artist Zid.

Before reading the issue I felt a deep indifference to the artwork. Personally, there’s something off about comics trying to be photo realistic and Zid’s art originally struck me as a little too realistic with a touch of abstraction. But that was before I began reading the words and slipping into the world Niles and Zid were building. It grew on me.

Detective Philip Khrome (our anti-hero), patrols the skies/streets with his jetpack searching for trouble. He follows the rules, does his job, but a mistake in judgment ending with the death of a man armed only with a cross begins to haunt him. And it doesn’t help that the man would have been sentenced to death anyway; Khrome can only see that he shot and killed an unarmed man. You see, arrests and trials are streamlined and pronounced on a handheld device that hands out the verdict.

Khrome also has to live with the guilt of being responsible for putting his father in the big house for him reading a story with “talking animals” when he was a child.

You got it. It’s one of those futures and either you’re going to go with the concept of a totalitarian government that has excised all traces of religion, dissent, and….get this: books. Or maybe you won’t.

There’s enough here to keep a reader interested like the mysterious murder at the beginning of the book and Khrome’s relationship with a prostitute named Kylie who refuses to take his money and whom he loves secretly. You’ve got a scientist whose experiment has gone terribly wrong (somehow tied to the murders) and a co-worker, the beautiful Sonja Ando, who Khrome won’t give the time of day.

City of Dust is a good enough diversion, but quite honestly, if you’re not hooked by the ending splash page outro, there may not be reason enough to read the rest of the story.

The way I see it, there’s not enough good futuristic comics out there (the best usually written by Warren Ellis and other Brits). Sure, we’ve seen these themes before in a crap load of movies and TV shows (some brilliantly done, others forgettable), that’s part of charm: to see how they’re going to reinvent the conventional science fiction monster murder mystery with the big bad government in the shadows. I love the ambition and I like the characters enough to tag along for another issue.

Can Niles and Co. reinvent “Big Brother” for the new millennium? I hope so. His moody far future, dark future tale could be the shot in the arm that sci-fi comics need.

City of Dust: A Philip Khrome Story #1
Written By: Steve Niles
Art and Colors: Zid

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