Review by Sarah E. Portwood for Tumor Chapter 1
Rating:
This was the first comic I viewed on my new Kindle 2–I chose it because it was free. The comic is great. I was worried about it being formatted for the larger DX, but once I found out you could zoom in using the 5-way controller, it became quite comfortable to read.

Review by David Ivey for Tumor Chapter 1
Rating:
I read the first chapter of this graphic novel because it was free, but I’ve bought the other chapters and their previous graphic novel, Elk’s Run, because this chapter was so good.

William Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and the Fury, had part of the story told from the point of view of Benjy Compson. What made the story unique was that Benjy was developmentally disabled and didn’t process time like normal people. What happened to him as a kid and what happened to him as an adult where all jumbled together. J.H. Fialkov, the author of Tumor, does something similar with his novel.

The main character in Tumor is Frank Armstong, a hard-nosed ex-detective that takes a job from a mob boss to find the mob boss’s daughter. Unfortunately for Frank, he has a tumor that is affecting the way he processes time. Like with Faulkner’s Benjy, time doesn’t run in a straight line. This makes for a far more interesting story than just having a detective track down a girl.

Fialkov’s ability to develop characters and set a mood within the limits of a graphic novel are exceptional. A traditional author can go on for pages and pages with dialog and stream of consciousness (inner dialog) to develop a story, but Fialkov must do so within the limited space of a comic image. The fact that within a few pages of graphic images he can develop a character with the complexities of someone like Faulkner’s Benjy is simply amazing.

The art work reminds me of a movie directors storyboard. In other words, it’s like looking at still images from film. For example, a panel where you see someone’s shoulder and the back of their head in silhouette, and where the rest of the scene is not in silhouette. Close-ups, middleshots, longshots, etc., are used throughout the novel to tell the story. I suppose most graphic novels do this to some extent, but Noel Tuazon, the artist, is really good at it. The images all have a sketch like feel, that rely on shapes and shadows as opposed to meticulously drawn out lines, but this sketchy type style adds to the grittyness and film noir feel of the novel. Noel is also very good at conveying the emotions of the characters.

J.H. Fialkov and N. Tuazon have produced an outstanding graphic novel that is like no other that I’ve ever read.

Review by Brian Clarke for Tumor Chapter 1
Rating:
You know how someone will highly recommend you something that turns out to be awful or just mediocre and forever after you take their recommendations with a grain of salt? For me, that’s “Tumor,” a comic that had been recommended to me by a couple of people whose opinions I once trusted who I’ll now look at cross-eyed.

If you’ve never read another crime comic or seen a crime film, “Tumor” might be the comic for you, just like “The Boondock Saints.” You’ll marvel as the protagonist tries to solve one last case as his perception becomes unreliable, but then one day somebody will show you “Memento” just like you hope somebody would show a “Saints” fan “Pulp Fiction” or even “Full Contact” and they’d realize what they’ve been marveling at is actually a piss-poor imitation of something great that it’s ripping off. It’s not that “Tumor” is so terrible, it’s that the exact same story has just been done so much better so many other times.

What’s always a dead giveaway for me is the dialogue. Whereas Quentin Tarantino or Raymond Chandler have as much fun with the words their characters say as they do the story, the lines here are as pedestrian as something you’d find in a recent Val Kilmer DTV title (in fact, there are many lines in “Tumor” that may seem familiar if only because you’ve heard them repeated in so many bad cop shows and telemovies throughout the nineties). The characters all speak in the same voice and it’s flat and perfunctory. “Boondock Saints” falls into that same category as the look of the protagonists is quite cool from the second you see it, but the moment they open their mouths, they reveal their idiocy and the movie loses most normal, thoughtful audience members.

Ignoring “Boondock Saints,” let’s compare apples to apples. Take Brian Azzarello and Victor Santos’s comic, “Filthy Rich.” Like “Tumor,” it’s a crime noir, it’s black-and-white, it’s manga-sized and the main character has a dark past that’s revealed across the main plot involving a troublesome dame who the main guy is tasked with protecting. It’s a familiar trope, but with every line and every twist and every character, Azzarello brings something new to the story because he’s that kind of author. In “Tumor,” Fialkov and Tuazon appear content to have the high concept do all the work for them. If you find it hard to be dazzled by the idea that a man with a tumor is having a hard time with his perception as this story happens around him, then this is a hard book to recommend. It’s an interesting set-up followed by seven chapters of painfully boring and clumsily-revealed exposition that drums out any good feeling you had towards that concept by the time you reach the end. You know this by the time you get to Chapters 4 and 5 when still, nothing has happened.

It’s too bad because for this to be the first comic “created for the Kindle,” you’d hope that would be something that would open the floodgates for more content with a bang, instead of a whimper. If this is the best we can hope for, then I’ll think twice before downloading another creator-owned book.