A young girl on a summer holiday program in an abandoned shopping mall meets Jen, a mysterious older girl with a secret. In the flooded basement car park is a giant egg and elsewhere in the building are hundreds of tiny brains. Somehow it’s all connected to a massive explosion that took out twenty city blocks 12 years ago - and whatever caused it is back to do it again…
Chris Gooch is a talented cartoonist and I’ve enjoyed some of his books in the past, but his latest, In Utero, is definitely his weakest long-form comic.
Hey wait I got a new complaint: it’s a very unsatisfying narrative that fails to even hint at, let alone explain, basic reasons for why anything in the story is happening. What are these monsters and are their powers unlimited? Where did they come from? Why is any of this happening here and now? What was the relevance of the explosion 12 years ago, especially as it doesn’t seem to have affected anything - why not just remove that element entirely? Why is Jen singling out Hailey? What’s the point of the story? What does anything in the story mean?
Without delving beneath the surface of the story elements, we’re left with a very superficial, uninteresting and forgettable story. As it is, the story is basically Hailey and Jen talking about nothing while faceless government bods mill around the mall until a pair of big dogs fight at the end. It’s so dull and doesn’t justify the nearly 250 page length.
It’s an original story at least - there isn’t really anything I can compare this too. Gooch knows how to competently tell his story through sequential art and his art style is quite nice. It’s heavily let down by less-than-competent writing unfortunately.
If you like indie comics and are interested in this cartoonist, Chris Gooch’s best book to date is Bottled, but I’d skip the disappointing and underwhelming In Utero.
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