Leaving Megalopolis was sold to us on the premise that it was the type of story that Gail Simone and Jim Calafiore couldn't tell at one of the big companies. A story so violent that it had to be sold and published independently.
I'll start off by saying that as a fan of both Gail Simone and Jim Calafiore I'm a little let down by this book. While I can't say that it's bad I will say that it's solidly mediocre.
For one Calafiore didn't really seem to put a lot of imagination into the character designs for the heroes turned villains. A notable exception being the most powerful of the baddies a character named Overlord. With Overlord Calafiore did a great job of portraying strength and power by having a large granite "O" strapped to the character's chest. But other than that I can't say any of the character designs really stood out. I understand that when coming up with multiple characters for a stand alone story we can't expect every one of them to be the next Spider-Man costume but in recent years we've seen guys like Quitely pull it off in a monthly title like the Authority, so I don't think it's unfair to expect a little more from Calafiore, an artist who has made a career out of making tough costume designs like Deadpool and boring designs like Catman really stand out on paper. His ability to draw very distinctive musculature can make up for weak costume designs of characters such as Bane and others he's drawn in the past. But he actually moved away from that strength for most of the characters in this book. The design of characters like Red Flame give no hint to the fact they were conceptualized by one of the industry's top talents. I'll leave the blame for that name on Gail Simone's door step. How did no one think to tell them that dressing a character in Red and having him shoot flames and also calling that character Red Flame was way too 1960's for this day and age? Nowadays motherfuckers are called The Midnighter and Winter Soldier not Red Flame.
Despite those concerns Calafiore isn't really the one who dropped the ball here. While he didn't by any means produce his best work the biggest failings come from the usually solid Gail Simone. Simone gets a lot of credit for her adventure stories but her real strength comes from her characterizations and the interactions of the characters with one another. But here with Leaving Megalopolis she abandons that and gives us a book with no likable characters. Which isn't to say they're unlikable but that you don't really feel for any of them.She tries to Tarantino the story and bring us into the lead character Mina's prior life throughout the story. But this just means that by the time we have the full story and the supposed empathy it should entail the book is pretty much over and we never got a chance to really care about Mina. Furthermore her back story is actually not that interesting, doesn't make her empathetic and doesn't really seem to play too much into any of her actions in the book. There's a real disconnect between what I think a main character's back story usually accomplishes and what it accomplishes in this book, and that ain't good.
So an entire book of characters I couldn't care about in the slightest. We essentially are saying fuck Kirk and Spock, this ride on the Enterprise needs all the red shirted ensigns we can fit in a transporter. Not one death matters in this book. Not one. First of all any character any where who has a break down because of the death of a raccoon can suck my balls, individually or in tandem. Who can love a woman who loves raccoons? Raccoons suck cause they're the spawn of the devil, they have rabies, they have human hands and I heard they spread the AIDS virus throughout North America all the while blaming it on green monkeys. All that in my mind means they should be mauled to death by dogs. And yet the only sign of honest affection Mina shows throughout this story is to a fuckin' raccoon. Terrible.
The plot you ask? A city filled with superheroes who turn evil because they were farted on by a creature from hell or space, they never decide. Anyway the heroes then become murderous villains who apparently are overcome with a blood lust that can be sated by killing someone every 4 hours or so. That is unless you're Lisa. Lisa is introduced into the story under the pretense that she was sexually assaulted recently and she becomes a member of the group of humans trying to get out of the city. She is eventually revealed to be one of the heroes turned villain. But for some reason she spent the entire issue until the end without the blood lust and need to kill. She uses her signal device to summon other villains so they can kill the group she's with. She let us know that the space hell flatulence changed the heroes and let them know how pointless their existence had been. Lisa points out that hunting humans in now sport for them and she's a decoy. But I wonder a decoy from what? And if by decoy she meant that her job was lure the survivors some where (not what decoy means) why didn't she do that one time the entire issue? She has next to no influence on the plot. Then she gets killed by a head butt and a bullet. So yeah not exactly arch super villain material.
Grand finale? No, Overlord turns on his "allies" when his intended next victim starts reciting verses from a comic book featuring Overlord's character. "You think you know the man of granite? You must have rocks in your head!". Yeah I don't get it either. I kept expecting a kid with a snow globe to pop up and have me say "Oh, this shit is all a dream." So much more would make sense if this was some kid's dream of a comic book world. And by make sense I mean not make sense but in a reasonable way.
There's too much wrong with this story to cover. The plot gaffs/holes are multitude. For instance Lisa fires her gun after falling into water. Immediately after this a character tells her that her gun probably won't fire because it's wet. This is even though she just fired the gun mere seconds earlier, and immediately after emerging from the water. Or there are many villains who seem to die when shot. But how did they live this long if bullets can kill them? The opening shows the wrecks of tanks that seem to have been thrown around. This tells us the army had been fighting these guys. Shouldn't most of the villains who aren't bulletproof been dead by then? What the fuck kind of resistance was being put up? Or the speedster named Fleet. He's fired on by a shotgun and catches the bullets and returns them. But shotguns discharge pellets not bullets.
All and all I think Simone over promised and under produced here. She said she'd be able to write a far more adult story than she ever could working for DC but the truth is besides the fact the word "fuck" is sprinkled throughout the story we don't get any of the next level shit I was hoping for. They just never manage to get the volume turned up to 11. I really didn't find it that violent either though we were told this was going to be a big part of why they didn't take the story to an established publisher.
