Something is destroying walking cities - but what? Meanwhile, a super criminal attempts a daring rescue by breaking into an ultra-secure compound of the mega-rich.
Rain Like Hammers showcases Brandon Graham’s extraordinary imagination, as he takes readers on a sci-fi Alice in Wonderland-esque barney that nevertheless feels similar to our world. That high level of creation is also his weakness as it feels like he becomes so enamoured with the minutiae of his world-building that he forgets the story he’s meant to be telling.
He mentions in his afterword that this book was conceived as a short story collection but that somewhere along the way he decided to unify it all - and that’s probably partly why it doesn’t work. That entire final act is an incomprehensible mess as Graham tries to bring these disparate threads into a cogent narrative and completely fails. Characters duplicate so you don’t know who’s who, or why, there’s a giant space judge doing something and a golf-playing detective who practices erotic meditation saves the day somehow?! Gibberish.
That first issue is brilliant though. We follow the day-to-day life of Eugene, an office worker, and his life feels like a lot of people’s today: you go to work, push buttons, stare at screens, come back to your home, watch TV, repeat. It captures the loneliness and isolation of modern life beautifully as well as the experience of being in lockdown - uncannily too, given that this comic was created pre-pandemic. He also notes, quite profoundly, in his afterword that “depression looks a lot like lockdown” which is why this particular comic is so powerful, in its own quiet way.
I wish Graham had stuck to his initial idea of a series of short stories because I’d’ve loved an entire book of these zen sci-fi comics. Instead there’s the convoluted super villain/heist thing. Not that that part of the book was devoid of anything good - the super villain’s daughter, El, is having assassin training (or something - Graham’s not nearly as good a storyteller as he is an artist/designer), and the hotpot scene was exciting.
And I can’t say enough good things about the art and Graham’s world-building. I loved the strange architecture, the huge interior and exterior spaces contrasted with the intricately detailed cityscapes like Sky Cradle, the puzzling but oddly familiar jobs, the wonderful vending machines that deliver giant egg-shaped food packages that transform into miniature edible landscapes like curry formed into small mountains, the laundry box where you drop dirty clothes into the top and clean, neatly folded clothes plop out from the bottom a moment later, the small bugs the characters smoke - there’s so much here and it’s so imaginative. One character has a baby on a stick on fire as a weapon! The aesthetics are amazing.
But most of the second half of the book really bored me. The aristocracy stuff was dull, Brik Blok seemed to be treading water, the golf-playing detective and his sex robot servant car thing was too much, and the entire finale was garbled, underwhelming nonsense.
Going back to his afterword for the last time, Graham says that he started this comic as a way of working through his frustrated feelings of directionlessness which makes sense as that’s translated into a directionless book! Still, there is plenty to appreciate here thanks to his imagining of this remarkable sci-fi world and parts of the story are quite good too, even if they’re all found in the first half.
Not a must-read, but if you’re in the mood for some thoughtful and creative sci-fi, Rain Like Hammers is worth a look.
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