REVIEW: Norman #1

Script & Art: Stan Silas
Translated by Cat Connery
Review: Cody "Madman" Miller

I don’t exactly remember how I became aware of Norman but bought in for two reasons; in my humble opinion the cover is absolutely fantastic, and the tag line cemented the deal, landing Norman on my pull list.

“This is Norman. Isn’t he cute?” (Our first glimpse of Norman reveals him to be a nice looking blonde-headed boy with a backpack full of saws, knives, and other bladed WMDs.) So blonde and innocent. Well, kinda innocent. Apart from all the killing. See, Norman’s decided that he’d like nothing more than to be a serial killer . . . one of the greats, like Freddy Krueger, or Leatherface. You know the really good serial killers . . . Luckily, Norman has plenty of people on which to practice . . . all his classmates. In fact, he’s getting pretty good at this whole murder thing. With his invisible familiar Thing-A-Mie at his side, he’s only going to get better, unless something, or someone, stands in his way…



Well, that’s what sold me at the time. I thought it sounded kinda fun. Cover art was badass, so I rolled the dice . . . sigh.

Norman was originally written by Mr. Silas in his native French. Then some jackwagon decided the book was good enough to translate into English and who knows how many other languages. Well, shame on that person. My love affair with Norman ended just after the intro on the title page. You see the art on the inside doesn’t even compare to the glorious cover art, not even a little. The characters look like some bastard hybrid of the South Park kids and Japanamation. That’s right, Norman, I said it. The art and story both reminded me of that Death to Dinksville comic that the HCB reviewed many moons ago…but much, much worse. I completely gave up hope for this book when Norman’s evil familiar shows up and instead of the intriguing, menacing demon-beast we see with glowing eyes on the cover, Thing-A-Mie is a levitating baby in a purple devil costume. You have got to be kidding me. I can’t take this seriously . . . not even for fun. The art for this book is a solid meh with a giant helping of disappointment and fist-shaking contempt.

The wordy bits are just as bad. Maybe it was lost in translation . . . maybe it was not entertaining in French as well, or possibly it was Mr. Silas’s last attempt to sell a few copies of Norman. I don’t really care; like I said, I stopped caring when the suck smacked me in the face on page one.

Basically Norman just kills a few people, talks to Thing-A-Mie about killing people, and kills a few more people . . . the end. There are a few pages about a girl that kills people too, pops pills on every page, and may or may not end up Norman’s main girl. They appear to be forging some killing alliance of sorts against the world. Meh, Meh, Meh.

The only part of this book that I liked besides the cover and intro was this part where Norman stabs a fat kid in the gut and instead of bleeding out he starts leaking fat juice everywhere as Thing-A-Mie shakes his head remarking with a shrug, “Must have hit a fat pocket . . .” See, that’s my kind of tacky tasteless humor, but even that couldn’t save this sinking ship. I don’t care what language it’s in.