The last issue reveals Wool doesn’t just have a pacing problem or a perspective problem, it has a scale problem. Palmiotti and Gray never make the silo society seem real enough. They never show the silo in a way to make one believe anyone besides the cast lives there.
It’s not imaginative enough in how they’re adapting the comic. Sure, Broxton’s art is a little claustrophobic, but there’s no opportunity for it to be anything else.
Without a sense of the society, the writers don’t give the characters a setting, so their implied back stories and histories have less–or no–resonance. It hurts the comic immensely and could have been easily fixed.
It’s a fairly good final issue. The tension is honest, the plot twists are not. They never get enough time, but Gray, Palmiotti and Braxton are all professionals. Wool ends competently, but without anything special about it.
B-
CREDITS
Writers, Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray; artist, Jimmy Broxton; letterer, Bill Tortolini; editor, Matt Hoffman; publisher, Jet City Comics.
Wool is a frustrating comic. Presumably to stick with the narrative structure of the source novel, Gray and Palmiotti constantly waste time and pass up opportunities for a better structure.
The issue starts with the protagonist narrating. The fourth issue and Gray and Palmiotti have finally settled on having the protagonist. And on having her narrate. Only she doesn’t narrate for long and the focus soon shifts back to the subplots.
It’s almost like Wool, the comic book, is meant to inspire the reader to instead go read Wool, the novel, in order to understand the character motivations. Because Gray and Palmiotti try for intense scenes, montage sequences, all sorts of things they can’t get done because they haven’t set up the characters well.
It can’t really be so obvious, can it? So much of Wool’s cast not seeming to be able to see what’s going on has to do with them being simple silo folk, used to living a certain way and absolutely unable to see the obvious. Like poisoned water.
Wool opens with one protagonist, then moves on to another, then promises a third. It’s a novel adaptation, which might have handled the transitions smoother, but writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti are a tad abrupt. They do well establishing the setting–a post-apocalyptic future where everyone lives in a huge silo underground and can’t go outside–but the characters and their relationships are confusing.
