Pure cool. Neon cyberpunk noir starring Mick Jagger in an Aquaman shirt & a supporting cast of beautiful losers & gangsters in Picasso masks. Kinetic, night-time, fluid. Like Cowboy Bebop, stripped down

Paul Pope has been one of my favourite comics creators since I picked up issue #6a of THB back in 2000. Heavy Liquid, which I first read ages ago and am rereading now, is pretty much everything I love about his stuff. The beautiful art, the ideas, the attention to detail, the fashion, the world that he created. Heavy Liquid is just an awesome cyberpunk comic about art and crime.Kind of weirdly, the hardcover is not actually the best way to read this comic. If you can, you should try to track dow...

Rarely have I been so entirely unaffected by a book I actually finished. The best thing I can say about Heavy Liquid is that it was short, but I don't have anything really horrible to say about it either. Paul Pope is not a great talent. His dialogue is damningly sparse and his artwork isn't kinetic enough to convey the action it's supposed to, so the story feels plodding when it should spark and muddy during ostensible moments of clarity/revelation. The relationships and archetypes are stamped

This comic is great; the illustrations and dialogue are all fantastic. It's so seedy and grimey you feel like you need to take a shower after reading it.And if you ever come across a cheap copy, snatch it up because they are apparently out of print and the prices are way jacked up.

“Kid, if I had something snappy to say, I would. But I don’t.” – S, Heavy Liquid Chapter 4.That line comes at the end of a scene full of snappy dialogue. It breaks a rhythm seemingly designed to lull the reader into a sense of security in order to break it before launching into a new set piece, shattering our expectations as it takes us somewhere completely new. It happens a lot in this book. Just when Pope lulls the reader into thinking he knows what he’s looking at and can relax, he comes out

Audience: Ages 16 and upThe year is 2062 and S, like most people in the world of organized crime, would do anything to obtain the mysterious metal like substance, heavy liquid. S has just finished stealing a large quantity of the stuff for an exorbitantly wealthy art collector when he is confronted with a new challenge: locating a young artist who disappeared five years ago. Although he is not in the business of finding people, S has a personal interest in the artist and decides to accept the ch...

Heavy Liquid is a thoroughly enjoyable fusion of art and thrills. With a deceptively simplistic palette, light turquoise playfully intertwines with equally light pinks that could be found on ballet shoes. With blacks that range from wavy outlines toward more denser depictions, the simplistic duo drives the story until punctuated with strong overlays of red that convey urgency and poignancy.The colors are great as so are the characters and the plot that guides them along. Following a not-so-simpl...

I took awhile to finish this, but that was mostly from lack of appropriate times to get back "into" it, because it's a dense atmosphere that makes up 'Heavy Liquid'. Out of 5 stars, I lean more toward 3.5, only because I "liked it+" and it had some moments where I couldn't make out what I was seeing in a panel or two. That's mostly Pope's frenetic art stylings, and not necessarily a flaw.Either way, this is a cool, broody book, kinda set in the future-ish. At least, there are some gadgets and su...

I bought this to support my daughter's yard sale, but it turned out pretty good.The art has a unique voice, sort of a surreal, dark, South American-ish feel. Thugs in face masks like Cubist art are chasing our hero. The plot is cyber-punk. Our tough looking hero has cybernetic implants that enable him to commune with special investigative devices that mine the world's data. He took this case partly to get the latest such, the "P'tit Salaud".There's a new material, 'Heavy Liquid'. Our hero has st...

paul pope is a genius. this book moves like an akira kurosawa movie on the pages, beautifully crafted in a very post-modern pop art pulp style. feels like a blend of techno-thriller ala william gibson fused with phillip k dick, only with such a cinematic feel that this book moves like a noir ballet. i am in awe of the storyboards, the panels and most of all, they style of his inks. what looks so offhand at first, begins to look so calculated, so stylish and so cunning in its strokes that it beco...

Bringing thoughts of a character out of the characters mind is not easy. Here I think it made the pages unnecessarily verbose. Most of the lead character's commentary is trivial and does not add up to the scenes. Since there is a very original sublety to this story, in which the tech is really advanced but inconspicuous, and there are hints of influence from film noir, the author could have used that film noir story telling to match the sublety of his art. And make the characterś speech sparse,

I love manga, I love comics, I love bandes dessinées, I love science fiction, I love rock’n’roll, I love to draw. I wanted to find some idea that would blend all these impulses in one story and come off like a barrage of visual noise and read like a comic book from the future. The scary future, the screaming future—a place where people are becoming machine-people, where people live in crumbling cities, where people sleep in cramped ghettos and move faster than sharks across vast blue oceans, a w...

Perhaps Pope's best sustained story. It is a unique twist on noir narrative, a detective-like tale with drugs and even some sci-fi thrown in. One could try to dismiss Pope's comics as being too hip or enmeshed in trendy youth culture (including the big manga influence), but that would be ignoring the depth and complexity of his storytelling.

*sort of spoiler, but it's pretty vague since I don't understand the ending myself*So after 40 pages of volume 5 (the last one), Paul Pope went, 'Shit, I need another 10 pages. I think I've exhausted all moon, star, planets, and really big planets. Maybe I should draw some boobs. But damn the only female character I have is actually single with no love interest. Would a gun chase sequence work? Explosions? I don't want to look like Michael Bay though. He gets a lot of hate. Come on brain, I know...

"Have you ever faced art for art's sake?I wonder if you have the stomach..to face death for art's sake."This sums up the trippy graphic novel by Paul Pope. Playing with shades of green, red and blue, he creates the psychedelic experience on paper, accompanied by a solid noir/mystery story about a rare expensive drug and a guy that always runs from the ghosts of his former life.

Another 5 star PP Illustrated novella. Close to perfect. Nearly animated and come to life as it is read. Fast, tense, sexual, youthist, futuristic, restrained, smart, urbane, sweet, ripe....This is how I think PP would describe his own book. It IS full of the juice of the generation it was written for and about. His best, most complete work, and the one that drops you off, just at the edge of a potential revelation/epiphany...the very last page and panels show you the glimpse of the solution to

A noir-tinged dystopian graphic novel that centers around a highly addictive drug, a sculptor, some hoods in Halloween masks, and a trip to Paris. Story a bit hard to follow at times.

I read Batman 100 quite some time ago, and I barely remember it. But the name "Paul Pope" stuck in my mind.When I saw this book at my local comic book shop, I hesitated to purchase it. Not because of Pope, but because the book looked ugly. The drawing is messy, but energetic. The color palette is limited to about three garish colors, too. The story sounded interesting though. It's set in the future and concerns an addictive drug, espionage, travel, violence and adventure.At first, I was so put o...

I originally read this in its original, issue-length format, and I remember really, really enjoying it. Going back to it now, many, many years after first checking it out, I find myself not *quite* as enthralled as I was then. Nevertheless, my understanding of the world, and of art in general, has broadened some, and so while I can't say I'm thrilled by the experience of reading this, it definitely is a book quite unlike any other. Strange, fever-dream imagery combined with a murky, difficult pa...

A mysterious metal that can be cooked to produce a peculiar drug, an art collector looking for the perfect artist, a bunch of violent thugs on the hunt, and S, who stole the metal, takes the drugs, is hired by the collector to look for the artist while the thugs are on his tail. Near future sci-fi hard-boiled crime art chase detective thing, painfully hip and cool and street-smart, thoroughly rock'n'roll and a little bit out of this world.