Halfway through Four Horsemen, I remembered how it ended. It'd be easy to just say poorly and dismiss it, but Four Horsemen is actually a pretty good example of what's wrong with “sophisticated suspense,” or was wrong with it back in 1999. Horsemen was part of Vertigo's “V2K” line, a series of titles tied (somehow) to December 31, 1999. Writer Robert Rodi took a four issue limited series and did some incredibly standard things with it. There are Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and there are four issues. In each of the four issues, there is a person who has a story one of the Horsemen listen to and... well, learn something about how worthless modern civilization has become. The four issues happen concurrently, so after a certain point--I think starting with the third issue--Rodi's phoning in large parts of the script, just having artist Essad Ribic draw from different angles. The interconnected limited series is a comic book standard. It certainly was back when Rodi wrote Horsemen, because it's a standard DC popularized.
As DC's “sophisticated” line, Vertigo is incredibly hit or miss. On one hand, they seem to be trying to appeal to a wholly different audience, but on the other, they appear to be calling the readers of superhero comics dumb. So, that whole relationship is a little weird. But Horsemen is hardly sophisticated... Rodi's characters are stereotypes, his long dialogue passages unreadable (somewhere during the third issue, I just stopped trying to read it; why bother, there was no actual content)--he goes so far as to include an angry teenager with a gun, he's so original.
The “sophisticated” approach seems to be one where the writer talks about stuff from a soapbox, but doesn't really get it, so he just piles it all in. Making space for something, then filling it with crumpled up newspaper (or comic books). It's gibberish and it's hard to believe anyone actually sat and read through it.
Ribic's art is nice, but so what? Horsemen's ideas aren't insulting, they're just really stupid and already dated in 1999 hipster nonsense (the corporations are taking over the world, blah blah blah--at one point, though, it does come off sounding like it's the Elders of Zion, which was kind of cute and unintended, I'm sure). Vertigo's problem then--and probably today, but it seems to be dwindling as a line--is it tried to appeal to people who weren't necessarily smart (if they were, they would have dropped Horsemen after the first issue), but just thought regular DC comics were for rubes.
Comics are good or bad based on their quality, not the issues they discuss, the violence they visualize or the obscenities the characters can spout. Four Horsemen is the perfect example.
