The wake

The apocalypse gets a watery spin in this breathless graphic novel from writer Snyder (Batman: The Court of Owls, American Vampire) and illustrator Murphy (Joe the Barbarian). Marine biologist Lee Archer, reluctantly working alongside her enemies in the government oil industry, comes face-to-face with an awakened species of homicidal mermen. They look like the creature from the black lagoon, swarm by the thousands, and have a taste for humans. Two hundred years later, Leeward, another spiky young woman with authority issues, is selling black-market mermen heads in the flooded ruins of America when she hears what sounds like an ancient recording from Archer. The ragtag new government is just as problematic as the old one, leaving it to Leeward and her trusty dolphin pal, Dash, to solve the centuries-old problem on their own. Snyder's story is a ripsnorter from start to finish, heavy on the action and quips. The threads keeping the settings together barely hold, but Snyder's punchy style and Murphy's detail-dense pages and Tank Girl-style art are highly satisfying. Agent: Jennifer Lyons (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Ambitious comic-book creators who eschew convention and clichés and summon the courage to give readers an epic deserve proper credit...and honest blame should the results fall flat. So it is, with this Eisner Award-winning yet indigestible goulash of borrowings from the aquatic adventure movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The plot concerns the discovery of a mysterious race of sea monsters and the resultant ecological devastation, with half of the action set during the former and the rest occurring 200 years afterward, with flashbacks to the distant past. Think The Abyss meets Leviathan, but readers will get nostalgic for Waterworld as author Snyder keeps bogus dramatics and leaden folklore references coming while failing to develop any characters worth caring about. Murphy's art resembles a grittier, chaotic variant of Kevin O'Neill's work (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Verdict The Wake might make for a passable movie someday. Violence, profanity, and grisly imagery; suitable for teens and up. Optional for au courant graphic novel collections but not if volumes of the back-in-print Miracleman (LJ 9/15/14) are available.-J. Osicki, Saint John Free P.L., NB (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.