By Zack Quaintance — Decorum #1 is an interesting comic, in that early on it feels more like a multimedia storytelling experience than it does a traditional graphic sequential story. This book is top heavy with the mythos, history, details, and even language of a sci-fi world that is brand new to all readers. As a result, I found myself a bit disoriented through the first two acts or so. I could tell that there were skilled storytellers at work with big ambition, but I couldn’t quite get myself to a solid point where I was sure what they were trying to do here, or, perhaps most importantly, what I should care about within this new complex world they were building.

To be fair, I ended up really liking Decorum #1 after a beginning that had me doubting where it was all going. There’s a metaphor I kept coming back to when conceptualizing this review, so I’ll just hit you with it now — Decorum #1 is almost like if you went camping, and you had a really nice, really complicated tent that promised all kinds of innovative amenities...but you rushed through its setup. The end result of that would be a tent that has all kinds of promise, all kinds of interesting features waiting to be unlocked. Yet, when you first go inside of it it feels a bit jumbled and wobbly, as if it’s liable to collapse and leave you buried under too many confusing parts.

To be fair again, this tent (bear with me on this metaphor, folks) becomes a bit sturdier as we get toward the end of this comic and the action becomes linear, clearer, and driven by characters. For the first two acts or so, however, it’s easy to get lost in all the pieces, all the multimedia bits that have worked so well for writer Jonathan Hickman in his recent work on X-Men, charts, timelines, memos, histories, etc. The difference with this book, though, is we don’t have the benefit of well-tread or familiar concepts, characters, and ideas to orient us and ground us as we explore more complex territory by having info imparted to us via unconventional formats. 

This is also a stark contrast between some of Hickman’s other recent creator-owned work. I’m thinking specifically of East of West and Black Monday Murders, both of which wield similarly complex world-building and mythos, often via multimedia formats as well. Before plunging into it, however, the former book gives readers a number of issues of action to chew on with a traditional quest narrative while the latter gives us a clear plot engine in the form of a murder mystery. Decorum asks just a little bit more patience from the reader at its start, and it asks them to take almost a leap of faith, to trust that the dense points packed into more than a dozen pages of hazy, silent action and multimedia storytelling will be worth deciphering. 

And indeed, Hickman certainly has a body of work to make that leap of faith an easy one to take. The ideas in this book are quite strong. I especially like the security precautions he imagines for couriered packages. The idea is that it requires a retnal scan or some other kind of really intrusive and personally identifying verification, which will hit home with anyone who’s ever had an Amazon package stolen. Hickman is also teaming here with artist Mike Huddleston, whose imaginative panel layouts and absolutely striking imagery makes the first two acts of this book compelling to look at, even if we don’t have a character to latch onto or a solid idea of what this world is, what’s happening, or why we should care about it (aside from Hickman’s first page of prose that details something called the Solar Imperial Preserves).  

By the end of this issue, I found myself utterly immersed in the comic, with chapters two and three, to the point the ending felt sudden and abrupt (as all good endings to debut issue should, in order to keep the audience eager to come back). I’m sure the first half of this issue will make perfect sense over time and perhaps have great significance upon re-read. Stories structured this way can work and work really well (see David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest, the first few dozen pages of which are nigh indecipherable upon first read but bring it all into sharp focus once one has completed the novel), and the creative team is so talented, I’m happy to join them on the journey.

Overall: Hickman and Huddleston have created a multimedia storytelling journey, fearless and rich with experimentation. The first half is a bit disoriented and confused, perhaps by design, but the vast majority of readers will be thoroughly engrossed by the end of the third chapter. 8.0/10

Decorum #1
Writer: Jonathan Hickman
Artist: Mike Huddleston 
Letterer: Rus Wooton
Designer: Sasha E. Head
Publisher: Image Comics
Price: $4.99
Solicit: SERIES PREMIERE! There are many assassins in the known universe. This is the story of the most well-mannered one. "Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what knife you use."

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.