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Dec 20, 2013 Issue #48 - November/December 2013 - HAIM By Jeremy Nisen

There are some clever individual ideas in UXB, and some imaginative, absorbing, and disturbing visuals from creator/writer/artist Colin Lorimer, but, as a complete package, it’s a tough sell. The main characters—three boys stuck in strange life-suits that allow them to be the top dogs in their post-apocalyptic England—show a cartoonish lack of nuance, causing them to be far less interesting than the world Lorimer’s built for them to live in.

The designs are delightfully ghastly; end-of-book extras reveal that Lorimer designed the life-suits to incorporate the look of a school necktie meshed with a grotesque sort of medieval codpiece. It’s really that imaginative design sensibility and Lorimer’s draftsmanship that are the strongest selling points of UXB; the broad-brush characters and lack of stakes keep it from being a must-read. Overall, we’ll call it “okay,” and perhaps, if you find the premise appealing, it’s worth a flip-through or a library checkout to make sure. (www.darkhorse.com)

Author rating: 5/10