MIND MGMT, Volume 1: The Manager Review

A plane full of people suffer collective amnesia. A village where people are constantly making pots for no reason. A small town wiped out in an inexplicable massacre. Writer Meru decides to follow the strange trail of events for her latest book to answer the question at the heart of this dark mystery: who is Henry Lyme?

I’m not at all a fan of Matt Kindt’s but MIND MGMT, Volume 1: The Manager surprisingly wasn’t that bad. The story opens with an intriguing scenario – the amnesia plane – before moving at a fair clip across the world, taking our heroine Meru to some exotic locales… except she’s being followed! I grew up playing Broken Sword (for the youngs, that’s an olden style Uncharted), reading Tintin and watching Indiana Jones so that kind of globe-trotting action/adventure story appeals to me.

And it’s fun and unpredictable… until Meru finds Lyme and then it all goes a bit Pete Tong. We find out about MIND Management and its agents and then we’re in familiar territory – think Bond/Bourne - the action becomes clichéd and Lyme monotonously tells his life story in one gigantic info dump. He couldn’t have kept his mystique any longer than this introductory book, really? The backups did nothing for me either.

I absolutely loathe Kindt’s super-fugly art. The scratchy lines, the weak, messy watercolours, the stupidly cartoony figures – bleurgh! It’s a half decent story but the drama is completely undercut by the crummy childish figures that I couldn’t take seriously for a second. It really would be a better book with an artist who can draw in a semi-realistic style.

It didn’t impress me enough to keep reading beyond this first volume but, considering how bad Matt Kindt’s output usually is, MIND MGMT, Volume 1: The Manager is unexpectedly tolerable and mildly entertaining – in other words, it’s probably his best book!