Review: Against The Wall
Against The Wall writer Dino Caruso really wants the reader to care about the slightly obscure baseball derivative known as wallball. He spends time crafting a protagonist that's eager to help the reader learn the basics of this deceptively simple game. He even succeeds on this front - I found myself intrigued by the idea of the game and the world of gambling and backstabbing that the story takes place in.Sadly, this is all that Caruso and artist Shawn Richter manage to do in this ambitious but very deeply flawed self-published graphic novel. The script featured dialogue that is plodding and lifeless and story beats are telegraphed pages in advance. The wallball-playing protagonist, Dalton Prior, dreams about making an independent movie, yet shows not a whit of creativity about him despite the script's repeated attempts to tell us otherwise. In fact, the script is guilty of more telling than showing all around - plot movements are stiff and overexplained and very little is left up to the artist. Maybe this is for the best in this case - the art by Richter bears a stiffness and suffers a flat nature that makes all of the characters resemble toads stuck on a skewer more than people in motion1.
It's obvious that Caruso and Richter wanted to make a comic that offered something different to the audience, and that's worthy of praise. It's a shame that their skills weren't up to this ambitious of a task.
A copy of this book was provided by Caruso Comics for the purposes of review.
1Judging by Richter's website, he has recently made some very important leaps in his style and manages to avoid many of the pitfalls presented in Against The Wall.
