Living in Infamy has a great concept--supervillains in witness protection (though almost anything can be amusing in witness protection, just so long as the present action is more important than whatever put the characters in witness protection)--and it has some fun supporting characters, but it’s the epitome of pedestrian comic books. It’s an independent, from a DVD special feature-producing company, which is why I tried it out, and it’s better than most of the Big Two comics today (but that observation’s a rather measured compliment), but there’s something important missing from Infamy... People.
Infamy is a town where supervillains go about their normal lives, well-protected from the outside world--and the outside world is well-protected form them, but there’s only eight supervillains in this program the reader gets to meet. Infamy is supposed to be quirky and amusing, but it frequently fails to engage the reader on those levels. Instead, it hints at the inevitable big secret and tries to produce some character conflict. But, like I said, there aren’t any people in Infamy to be conflicted, so there are pages and pages of not boring, but not engaging dialogue. Many of the characters have stereotypical relationships and the ones who do not are used poorly. There’s a narrator--and it’s only one narrator, which is nice--but he’s not really the main character. He’s the central figure of the story, but he’s not a full enough character to sustain the story. His personal problems are generic and--with one exception--his whole character arc is predictable.
Worse, Infamy is a confusing read. The artist, Greg Kirkpatrick, doesn’t make characters look different--in their faces anyway, there’s an easily identifiable fat character and another with glasses--and he also doesn’t do action well. There’s a murder in the comic and I didn’t know until an issue later because he’s such a poor storyteller. His art’s a little on the cartoonish side--but he doesn’t embrace it, instead going for realism, which he can’t achieve--and Infamy would have looked better in black and white. The lack of color wouldn’t fix the faces, but the color does have a distracting pseudo-polish to it.
Living in Infamy is so mediocre, I’m almost completely indifferent to it (which made this post no fun to write). I guess there were some amusing parts, but it never pays off. It might be too short, but it’s another one of those stories a short time investment makes more palatable, so there’s a bit of a catch-22 there.