Here's a graphic novel that alternately impressed and frustrated me. It's nominally a reworking of Homer's 'Odyssey', freely adapted into a vaguely post-apocalyptic world, and I like that idea, but it has very few pages  dedicated to that goal, being a collection of six comic books, so only skims an obvious surface and misses the depth beneath it. So my first frustration was how this ended up as a single graphic novel instead of a series of a dozen of them or more. I think that's fair to mention but it's not fair to judge what it is on the basis of what it isn't.

It starts out very well, firmly on the impressing side. Our modern day Odysseus isn't given a name, so we think of him merely as the Soldier with No Name, a sort of everyman, if every man served in a succession of wars, honourably and well but without being a vicious killer. He never loses his soul, even if he sometimes thinks that he does. We first meet him in Syria, I believe, but the war is over, not because anybody won but because there's a new reality that's changing everything. And, more to hand, the army simply runs out of gas. So our unnamed captain holds an airbase until everyone has evacuated as far as they can, before starting the long journey home himself.

These early scenes are strong ones that set the stage for that journey by giving us a whole slew of information at once and then cutting off the feed. The Saudi royal family have been assassinated, during a prince's wedding. The oil fields have been hit, so the black gold is no longer flowing. China finally went in Taiwan but took out American satellites first, so the eye in the sky is blind. So it's a new world order, but we don't know if anyone's still fighting and, if they are, what sides they form and who's winning. Certainly there's martial law back home in the States (though a ridiculous typo that wasn't fixed by Image Comics has that as marshal law), but we know little more, as our focus becomes closed in on an alternating set of stories.

One is our unnamed captain as he tries to go home, with a very small band of men by his side: Sgt. Fortunato and a couple of others. Here's where any knowledge we might have of the 'Odyssey' is useful, though, quite frankly, we don't need to know anything about it at all. This is far from strict and we're not going to gain any insight if we can identify a pair of boats crushing a dinghy as the Clashing Rocks, though something tells me that they only made it into the Odyssey in some of the more recent tellings that blurred multiple source books into one.

Let's just say that you won't lose much, if anything, if you've never experienced any of these iconic ancient stories. Just read it straight, as a soldier trying to get home to his wife and son, Penelope and Terrence. It's just not trivial to travel during an apocalypse from wartorn Syria to the Catskills of New York. Maybe you'll recognise the Cyclops from an obscure pop culture reference but that's not important. He's just an obstacle to be overcome. Maybe you'll similarly acknowledge enticing radio broadcasts as a take on the Sirens, but they'll make sense even if you don't.

The other story is what's going on back home. The captain's family lives on land that happens to be located on a watershed, not particularly important during peacetime but rather desirable during the apocalypse. Men want that water and they'll resort to underhand tactics to get it: kidnap and blackmail and murder, just for a start. Penelope may wish, however briefly, that her husband gets home soon just because "he'll know what to do", but more realistically, she does whatever needs to be done. She's obviously the unelected leader of the neighbourhood and the rest of the locals listen to her and trust her. So, when Terrence is kidnapped, they help get him back.

I don't remember anything set at home in the 'Odyssey', so maybe that's all new, but it's insightful of author Gerry Duggan to focus on water. Every societal element found in this graphic novel is an entirely realistic if highly pessimistic take on something already happening. This came out in 2012 to collect comics released from 2007 to 2011, but we're dealing with water shortages in Arizona at present, because of over allocation of the Colorado river. One local township has had its supply cut off with legal battles following in the wake of that decision by the city of Scottsdale. It's not unfair to buy into this, even without any real explanation of why.

So much of this is positive and falls into the impressing me category, but there are frustrations too and one is the way in which the stories alternate. Generally speaking, that's fine and routine, but I took them to be unfolding in parallel, the captain dealing with this while his wife and son deal with that. However, there's a point where the captain finds himself stuck in one place for a long period of time, meaning over a year and maybe more than one, recovering from injuries. Yet the parallel story continues on unabated, without any obvious gap in time. So they aren't quite parallel and I'd be lying if I felt that to be annoyingly misleading.

Another frustration was in the final installment of the comic book, so the sixth and last act, which I felt was quite the cheat in how easily everything came together. This ain't over, captain, and you'll be a fool if you think it is. The world has gone to hell. You don't get to solve one minor issue in such an unrealistically brief passage of time and assume that means that everything else is solved too. That doesn't mean that there should be a sequel—and there hasn't been—but the happy ending should have just been the captain making it home alive, maybe reclaiming his name, and that's it. Discovering his wife and son alive should be as far as it goes. The rest is a cop out.

And that goes double for one of the strongest aspects that impressed me, which is how brutal this is at points, without ever venturing into the gratuitous. There are three scenes in particular that felt like gut punches with one of them revisited in guilt-manifested nightmares. One is as simple as the sea in front of a boat turning into floating corpses. Another haunting image is of prisoners in the hold of a sinking ship, knowing that there's no way to make it through the grate to stay alive. The third is a little deeper, because it's not just a set of captives in a bamboo cage; it's that they have all been blinded in one eye and none of them want to leave.

And that leaves one aspect that I'm not sure impressed or frustrated and that's the artwork from the pen of Phil Noto. It's coarse and impressionistic, almost as if each panel was drawn quickly and left as done just as quickly with the idea of returning to any of them with polish in mind verboten. Similarly, the vast majority of Noto's effort was in the foreground with the backgrounds often not there or drawn with the minimal effort. There are exceptions, of course, for pivotal frames, and it definitely seems like a deliberate decision rather than a dictate of time. Part of me appreciates it as appropriate for a story that's told in fleeting glimpses. Part of me wishes that he'd put in more time to polish it. I'm not sure which half will win that battle.

'The Infinite Horizon' was nominated for an Eisner Award, though I believe that was for a new title when it was only partly created. It was created independently and took longer than expected to be completed, because real life got in the way. Both author and artist welcomed new sons during the passage of time between creating the first issue and the last. I wonder how that affected the last issue with its easy ending. It seems very possible that they wanted to wrap it up and needed for it to be done happily because of their new families. So a mixed bag, but a good one, I think. ~~ Hal C F Astell