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Friday 19 June 2020

Family Tree, Volume 1: Sapling Review (Jeff Lemire, Phil Hester)


A little girl is transforming into a tree for no reason. Just like her dad did - also for no reason. And her estranged grandpappy is helping them escape cultists who are after them because they… like trees? Why? No reason.

Family Tree is the worst thing I’ve read from Jeff Lemire and that dude, while he’s written some great books, has written some real stinkers in his time: Descender, Hit Girl in Canada, The Terrifics, Royal City, Gideon Falls were all utter rubbish. But Family Tree? This was a total flat-line right from the start.

The characters are completely unoriginal: stock tough single mom, stock innocent little girl, stock troubled cynical teen boy, stock grizzled old man, stock faceless bad guys - each one a dreary cliche. The story is pathetically underwritten - uh, uh, this ridiculous thing is happening, uh, uh, RUN, RUN, DON’T THINK ABOUT IT!, just RUN, and, uh, uh, gunfire, and uh... RUN! Unimaginative, boring - just fucking awful. And speaking of awful, there’s Phil Hester’s ‘90s art looking stale on the page.

People turning into trees who’re then hunted down by murderous (lumberjack?) cultists is such a stupid idea - it’s more laughable than engaging and it’s never remotely engaging. I couldn’t have cared less about this rubbish story. A bad concept, badly executed makes for a bad comic - Family Tree is about as exciting to read as watching a tree grow. Even as a Lemire fan this was a worthless struggle to get through.

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