The Boys, Savage Brothers, and Casanova

It's the end of days, lakes are on fire, it's raining frogs, and zombies roam. Dirty toughguys Otis and Dale Savage make a living as bounty hunters -- folks pay them to track down the specific zombies that were their family members, and assure that their undead loved ones are put to a specific end. It's a good enough living, and they take their apocalyptic setting with teeth-gritted good humor. And then a mystery man in a suit comissions them to retrieve a zombie doctor from the dangerous zombie slum of Atlanta, and they proceed to get chased, shot at, and then stumble across a head in a jar who's about to sacrifice a virgin stripper. In other words, things get interesting. It's all well and good that superheros charge around saving the world, but what happens when they're not very good at it? Now and then there's bound to be a few screw-ups, innocent bystanders hurt, that sort of thing. The Boys, by Garth Ennis (of Preacher fame) and local artist Darick Robertson, follows crime-fighting from the perspective of the victims -- people who've been hurt by careless superheroics and who make it their business to see that the superheros pay. Reading Casanova, by Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá, feels like a homework assignment. What's happening here? From one panel to the next, we're leaping all over the place, and everyone's talking about stuff we've never heard about like we're supposed to be able to follow along. The book sort of feels like it's had all its exposition stripped out. Having too much exposition sucks, but having none at all is just disorienting.