This seemed like a promising story about a post-apocalyptic compound trying to survive amidst a world full of monsters with two rebellious brothers at its front and centre, however I found this graphic novel to be super problematic.

First of all, this volume was full of teenage boys & men being sex crazed and treating women like objects. Underage girls are constantly shown topless, doing sexual things, or just straight up sexualized with their character designs. It completely took away from the main plot and it made me extremely uncomfortable. Even a teenage girl who’s being sexually abused by an adult in the story is drawn like a sex object. The depiction of Japanese people also rubbed me the wrong way and was ridiculously stereotypical. For example, a Japanese man (who is, of course, the martial arts teacher) speaks with unrealistic broken English and one of the main characters jokes that he misses their old teacher and his grammar (the old teacher was white, by the way). On top of all this, there’s a ton of fatphobia in this. The main character insults someone for being “tubby” and the same boy is later bullied by a teacher for being fat and forced to work out without any commentary being made about why that’s probably not okay.

Clearly, I didn’t enjoy this one. I normally try to sugarcoat bad reviews a bit but I do not understand how something like this is being published in this day and age. I do not recommend this one and there’s plenty of other non-problematic graphic novels you could read instead.

*Thank you to Netgalley and Diamond Book Distributors for giving me an eARC in exchange for an honest review*