The first installment of Catalyst Comix was hard to enjoy for many reasons. The first of which being that in 22 pages readers are getting three different stories. It is incredibly hard to get a feel for the tone of any book with only a few pages each to tell some really insane stories. It also hurt the title because the art styles are so incredibly different in each story. Can Joe Casey find a way to make readers care about three different stories in the course of the second issue? Will the art teams begin to make more sense to to the reader in these twenty two pages? Who knows, check out the solicit text from Dark Horse.

Frank Wells saved the world, but now what?! Amazing Grace fights for life in a cosmic coma! And the Agents of Change have a superhero encounter session! Don’t miss the second smash issue of the baddest comic on the stands!

To answer the question these stories written by Joe Casey are yet again incredibly hard to get a read on. Without hesitation it is easy to say that readers should be the most interested in the first story with Frank Wells. The problem is that all of the insanity starts to get in the way.

Dan McDaid continues to have some great artwork that pushes the boundaries of a superhero comic. His style is scratchy with many lines, more importantly it can tell a clear story and be full of energy at the same time. He tackles each page with a wildly different approach. Paul Maybury has an incredibly distinctive style that should capture the imagination of readers. His second page in this issue is very ambitious from a storytelling perspective and seems to pay off in spades. While his style is good it is so jarring that it is hard to get a real feel for the pencil style. Ulises Farinas has a pretty clear style of pencilling that seems to work quite well. This is refreshing after the zany pencils of Maybury. The art seems to be unified in the coloring by Brad Simon in the last two stories. The verdict on whether or not the three styles come together in an acceptable form for me is still unsure.

The amount of ideas per page in this title are staggering. Joe Casey and friends should be admired for putting out such a challenging product. They need to start grounding some of these ideas or readers may not care much longer.

3/5