Page 45 Review by Stephen
From the writer of SAGA and the creative team behind PRIDE OF BAGHDAD comes this original, substantial, 336-page graphic novel about our emphatically voyeuristic obsession with sex. And it’s ever so clever.
A total triumph, with some stunning panoramas from some startling perspectives, this isn’t safe for work, for the bus, for the independent cafe where you’re quietly quaffing your latte... It’s not safe for anywhere really, although this post should be fine if I’ve angled the photos just right.
Our job, as ever, is to tease.
How do the creators so successfully achieve what they’ve courageous and salaciously set out to do? It’s all in the unique narrative perspective, by which I mean...
You know how most ghost stories rely on not the mere presence of the otherworldly, but the protagonists' ability to perceive those spirits and the fearful, threatening possibility that those spectres might make manifest their implicit threat - corporeally, physically?
Well our very dead duo here are indeed ghosts, whose ethereal, intangible nature enable them to go anywhere and see EVERYTHING; but they are powerless to physically interact and, more crucially, are completely immune from any form of detection: they cannot and will never be detected. They can watch everyone and everything with total impunity, indulging to their hearts’ content.....
NB 1: A good third of SPECTATORS is unequivocally explicit erotica, so that you can spectate too
NB 2: As a species we also seem pretty obsessed with violence, which is how our first protagonist comes to be but a spectre; and a cynic might suppose from the relentlessly, remorselessly rising body-count records in American gun crime that there’s a certain degree of one-upmanship involved. Well...
