Sweet Tooth: Wild Hunt Vol. 6
Collecting Sweet Tooth #33-40
Writer/artist: Jeff Lemire
DC Comics, $16.99, color, 200 pages
My wife and I were both disappointed.
In the interests of full disclosure I'll state that I'm not fan of Jeff Lemire's art. I find it so off-putting that I wouldn't be following this series if my wife hadn't expressed interest. So for her sake I have persevered, but as you'd imagine, I am not a huge Sweet Tooth fan.
That being said, I retained sufficient interest in what was a pretty intriguing story. To wit: A mysterious pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, with what little is left awaiting the first cough to let them know their time is up as well. The only people immune are mysterious human/animal hybrid children whose appearance was simultaneous with the plague. Lemire's story centered on Sweet Tooth (so named for his fondness for candy), one of the earliest hybrids if not the earliest one, raised in isolation but discovered and pursued by a militia intent on dissecting all hybrids to find the secret of their immunity. He is taken under the wing of a big, tough former NFL athlete with a checkered past who emerges as a protector for a number of disenfranchised players in this dying world. So the chase is on.
And I was interested, especially in the two central mysteries: What caused the plague, and what caused the hybrids? This book, the finale, answers both questions. And to quote my wife, when she finished the book, "That's IT?" Our questions were (mostly) answered, but the answers weren't particularly satisfying.
Then the book leaps a few decades in the future, to a world inhabited almost entirely by hybrids, of which Sweet Tooth is the leader. They face the dying remnants of humanity, but while Sweet Tooth wants to deal with them in peace, some hotheads want war. This conflict is introduced, developed and ended in a single issue, and smacks of a truncated end to what may have been planned as a second act. Because the book ends right there.
Which is just as well, as even my wife had lost interest. As I said in the lead, disappointing.
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