Clean room

What would happen if the Scientologists were mostly right and a race of alien parasites were afflicting humanity? The horror. The horror.

This is not for the faint of heart, but it's doing some interesting stuff with the personification of trauma and mental illness. While there are obvious parallels with Scientology, I'm also reminded of the X-Men, with Astrid and the Clean Room standing in for Xavier and Cerebro. The art veers from grotesque to sublime and catches the schismatic nature of story being told.

It's still not clear exactly what's going on by the end of this first volume, but the hooks are in deep and I'm intrigued to see how it plays out.

So I made it about halfway through this book before I stopped reading. I think Simone had some good intentions with what this story could have been, but the actual storytelling was a bummer. The plot crawled along with random spikes of shock horror to maybe convince the reader to keep going for some sort of resolution? But that resolution never came, even after reading through 4 issues in this volume.

I was really intrigued by this graphic novel, but it's similar to Nailbiter in that there's just too much going on (characters, plot hooks, etc.) without any sort of a hint at the overarching theme. Time travel? Out of body experiences? Aliens? Disease? Enlightenment? I have no idea and won't go back to this series to find out.