Here’s a delightful comic book I’ve been waiting for the chance to review. It began as a Kickstarter project a few years ago, and I backed it then and loved it. But I didn’t bother reviewing it because it wasn’t available to the general public. But now it’s being released as a miniseries from Massive Publishing.

The series is written and drawn by Sean Murphy…or Sean Gordon Murphy. He uses both versions of his name professionally.  Anyway, this book has a crazy meta premise. The Plot Holes are a group of fictional characters from various books or comic books. They exist in a realm called The Program, a “digital matrix” containing all ebooks. The Plot Holes travels through this program, going into the fictional worlds of unpublished books to perform “edits” on the bad ones, to make them good enough to be published. they need to save as many books as they can, or The Program will collapse, deleting all the books, and The Plot-Holes, from existence. They have a big digital meter in their HQ showing what percentage of success they have. They have a flying spaceship called The Footnote which they travel in, and little handheld computers called Bookmarks, which they use to enter the file of whatever book they want to travel into.

Seriously, how cool is that?

As the book begins, the team is led by ED, short for “Editor”, an old but tough woman. her origin is unclear I think she’s from some police novel. Johnny Manga is, obviously, from a Manga series, La Rasior, sort of like a female version of Blade, from a vampire romance novel, Kevin, who is basically a grumpy version of Calvin, from Calvin & Hobbs, Roar, a shapeshifting humanoid blue tiger from a fantasy novel, and Surge, an armored electric comic-book supervillain.

But as this team is fighting to save a science fiction book, which includes raygun-blasting little gray men and a giant alien worm, one of the team members doesn’t make it out alive. So Ed recruits Cliff Inkslayer, a wannabe writer himself, who is quite shocked when he discovers that he’s just a character from a book, that The Plot Holes couldn’t save. Cliff is our main POV character and comes off as an underachieving but relatable everyman. But just when Cliff is caught up, a threat arises that infects The Program and threatens to delete all the books unless The Plot Holes can stop it in time. Thus this issue ends on a riveting cliffhanger.

Sean (Gordon?) Murphy has built an intriguing new fantasy universe here, with fun characters, and beautifully-drawn action sequences. This is not a book to sleep on. Chacebook rating: FIVE STARS

AVAILABLE IN STORES AND FROM MASSIVEPUBLISHING.COM