A comiXologist Recommends:
Molly Brooks recommends

Broken Telephone

Broken Telephone is a complex international crime story that I won’t go into in detail for fear of spoiling too much. It involves the resourceful employees of an Indian call center, a chipper YouTube terrorist and her accomplice (someone else’s grandmother), a few hit men at various points along the moral grayscale, a self-important hostage negotiator really just doing his best, a popular uprising on an island nation which is NOT an American tourist’s coming-of-age redemption story, a prison guard in over his head, and a little boy trying to get more minutes on his phone before the murder guys come back.

This story would be a sinister drama if told from any one perspective, but when told from EVERY perspective it becomes a fascinating comitragedy of errors. Like the (I assume eponymous) game of telephone, important information gets lost every time the characters try to communicate, and watching the consequences of those missing pieces play out is super entertaining.

The entire book was written by Ryan Estrada (ryanestradadotcom), but each chapter is drawn by a different artist. The 18 contributing artists work in a wide range of styles, making some chapters feel slapstick, some dreamlike, some gritty and noirish. That could have made the project as a whole seem really disjointed, but each artist was clearly matched to each specific story with care, and instead the diverse styles work to reinforce the different filters through which each character is perceiving events as they unfold. The chapters that take place in the antiseptic call center, far removed from the action, are drawn with clean lines and light colors. Gecko (the environmental terrorist) lives in a world of fuzzed edges and richly saturated pinks and oranges. The more absurd a situation becomes, the more cartooned it is.

Each chapter stands alone fairly well, but the real strength of the piece is how they all fit together, and how new facets of the whole are revealed bit by bit while the reader gradually figures out how they all intersect.

The worry with a tangled narrative of multiple storylines like this is always that it won’t all come together in the end, but i thought this one did so in a really surprising and satisfying way. I really really enjoyed this book, and I highly recommend picking it up!

[Read Broken Telephone on comiXology]

Molly Brooks is an artist from nashville currently living in brooklyn. she works at comixology as a digital editor.