stewartfritz's review
2.0
"Smoke" is so much better than "Ashes". Unfortunately, this means that basically you're left with a pretty meh overall title because the great first half ends on a sort-of cliffhanger that's not well resolved in the mediocre second half. The art is decent in the first book, but in the second book ranges all over the place from reasonably good to pedestrian to downright terrible. Given the praise for this one I was expecting a lot better.
stgts's review
1.0
The good things in this book - the ideas that are never followed through, Nathaniel's inventive digital space - are so dragged down by the muck, the distractingly different changes in the art, the incessant picking at the dignity of anyone who is not a loner black-ops assassin. You could call that tragic, I guess, but it's hard not to feel like all the things I really enjoyed in this book are essentially accidents, which makes Kieron Gillen's fawning preface even more distasteful. My assumption is that he spent two pages mythologizing the author because he didn't have anything nice to say about the book either.
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