ISOM #2 answers questions, builds worlds, and expands everything you need to know about ISOM before he wages war on the criminals who rule the city and the monsters who rule Hell itself. On practically every level, the writing is significantly better than #1, and the art is top-tier quality. Read Full Review

Well... This time the new book got leaked much faster, so I could read it when it's still fresh. To be honest, it's not like Eric tried to improve here, it's still the same quality standard, but at least this time it wasn't boring as hell!

But there was literal hell instead... It's really beyond my perception how Eric could make this leap from street level crap to mystical crap in just two books... With the same one character... For Spider-Man it took what... years? This time Isom meets some Rippaverse's rip-off of Doctor Strange, who is a woman and that's about it. No real depth in the character, she can do magical tricks and has some magical wolves and dragons. That's it. It's not like any of the characters have any depth at all...

And there were many new ones. I hardly remember their names... At least besides Goodyng. This guy was okay as a side character and I like the idea behind him. He's some kind of damage control guy for hire. It doesn't sound any thrilling, I understand, but it's still better, than some generic strong black dudes or generic witches and demons and etc. He's generic white dude, but with a bit of an idea behind him.

The second book has all the problems of the first one. The art is still meh, some pages are fine, some are just arguably awful. The perspective is often weird (on some frames closer characters look like they are far behind and just giants), the detailing is often lacking and etc.

There's still too many splash-pages, than an annual 4-issue length book should afford. And the more splash-pages you see in a book - the less every single one of them feels special for you. Some random things suddenly get splash-pages, some other no any less important - don't. One of them got me especially confused, because it was supposed to show many of these demonic dudes in their habitat, but there were only black blotches instead... God, was it necessary to make a splash-page when it's nothing to really spectate there? You can easily take the short frame in the middle of the page and you won't miss any information at all! The guy really should learn detailization from any good artist.

The book still can't give you a self-sufficient story. Any Marvel or DC TPBs with the same length always (or at least in most cases) offer you a complete storyline of a bigger series. But here it's just meh... 3 pages were randomly wasted to remind you of Alphacore and Yaira, Yaira then gets 2 more random pages so you could see her up to something in her civic identity. And it's not some post-credits scenes! These are in the actual story!

6 pages were TOTALLY wasted on some absolutely random wrestler who got out of nowhere and didn't lead you anywhere. No, stop, he did! The whole scene was there only as a transition to some dude who watched this dude on his TV. This dude played some role in the first half of the book, but then he got in a... let's say "car accident" and that's it, we'll never hear about him in the second part of the book. I guess he'll be remembered in the last part of Ill-advised, because it felt like his role is important for the storyline of the first part. Which was almost absolutely abandoned in this one before it was even finished.

It's just really weird... The first half of the book was used to show so many different hardly connected scenes and there was barely Isom at all, it had some short Isom flashback about how he quit (and it was on the cover, wtf, it really took just a few pages...), there was some connection with the previous story and also it did set up this demonic crap. Which the second half of the book was all about. With no other scenes at all. Talk about balance...

Honestly, for free it's a fun one-off, but I can't imagine people really paying for this stuff and praising it online... Guys, if you like it - try to read some other comics, I beg you! Its quality is not even close to other books for the same price. Rippaverse is rip-off! Yeah, yeah, this is indie, blah blah. I missed the part where indie meant weak. more