Kill 6 Billion Demons, Book 1

Kill 6 Billion Demons, Book 1 by Tom Parkinson-Morgan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is going to come as a shock to some of you, but, in the instance of the excellent Kill 6 Billion Demons I actually prefer the webcomic to the physical object. Yes, I am normally quite adamant in my preference for physical artifact over photons, but when I spotted this at my friendly local book store last night and picked it up off the shelf, I realized something . . . about myself . . . and my age . . . and my eyes.

I've been following Tom Parkinson-Morgan's outstanding Kill 6 Billion Demons for quite some time now. I was thrilled to hear that he was publishing the work as a physical book. "Sweet," thought I, "the ultimate edition of this awesome comic". Yes, I already knew that the art was simply amazeballs and the plot had enough twists and turns to wrest it from the often flat and uninteresting landscape of comic book storytelling. I had grown to find some degree of depth in the characters that inhabit the strange heavens/hells of Throne, including the newcomer, Allison, a mortal human pulled into a world beyond her understanding. The setting, I knew, was a hallucinatory swirl of gods (alive, dead, and dying), angels, demiurges, and devils (including Allison's reluctant guide, Cio), colored so richly that one wonders if the very ink was infused with LSD. Parkinson-Morgan's art is finely-detailed, and his sense of scope is, at times, breathtaking, especially when one sees the sweeping vistas he uses to provide a birds-eye "map" view of the environs of throne. I was thrilled to be able to hold the book in my greedy little hands and exchange debit-photons for it.

And this is where the problem of the little book comes in.

Little . . .

It's too little. And my eyes, strained by decades of reading, are not getting any better.

Simply put, though I love the idea of the physical book, I much prefer the webcomic.

I never thought I'd say that. But it must be said.

Should you go buy the book? By all means, feel free. But I didn't. For me, too many intricacies are lost without a large image on a monitor, in this case. This is a world to be explored down to the smallest details, and I can't stand the thought of missing something that I know is there merely because of dogmatic devotion to the physical page. Instead of buying the book, I am supporting the artist by donating at the website. With photon-money that the artist can spend online or transform into real paper money at his leisure.

For once, technology wins.

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