I left my local comics shop this week with a large stack of comics and decided to read Cryptozoic Man #1 first - and it turned out to be the comic I finished last. About halfway through the comic I set it down, utterly frustrated with the amateurish writing and abysmal storytelling, and read every single other comic I had before returning to finish this off, feeling the beginning of a headache coming on as I did. Cryptozoic Man #1 is the worst comic of the week and is definitely a contender for worst comic of the year. The comic is by Bryan Johnson and Walter Flanagan, two of the "stars" of AMC's reality TV series Comic Book Men, as indicated by the logo in the top corner of the cover. In the last season, the Comic Book Men pitched Cryptozoic Man to Dynamite who agreed to publish it and, as the third season is about air, the comic is released. Johnson and Flanagan have produced other comic books before like the similarly dreadful Karney and their best book War of the Undead, both from IDW, but Cryptozoic Man reads like a first comic in its fumbling execution. The story is about Alan Ostman, a father who loses his daughter and is then abducted by aliens and turned into a half man, half monster just as the world becomes infested with more monsters and a strange man in a gimp pig mask begins telling him about his lost child. He discovers that in order to get her back he must defeat the cryptids of the world - Bigfoot, Nessie, etc. - and sets off to do that. This comic's premise is already ludicrously complicated and it's just the first issue - how does Ostman's missing daughter lead to him being abducted by aliens? Why do the aliens turn him into a half-man, half-monster? First, why him, second, why something so impractical? Where are all of the other monsters coming from - why is "the end times" happening now? Why is Ostman fighting the pig man? Where did the pig man come from? Is he in league with the monsters? Is Ostman in league with the monsters? How much time has passed since his daughter disappeared to him standing in the street fighting the pig man? Even Cryptozoic Man doesn't seem to know why he's fighting pig man when if he thought about it for a second he'd realise pig man is a bizarre manifestation of his daughter's stuffed pig. Also, are we supposed to be rooting for Cryptozoic Man - is he the hero? Why - because he lost his daughter? And is he working with the Greys? Why? I could go on and on but I'll stop there. Suffice it to say this is a poorly conceived and badly told story with absolutely no skill in the storytelling. But if the storytelling is frustrating, the writing is even worse. This is the first line of the book: "These hungry ghosts who walk amongst us, their waking lives long atrophied... their promise abandoned... content to suffer fragmented truths until oblivion, and along with it, the dream's end". It's like reading a high school student's creative writing effort. Johnson is trying way too hard to give his prose a weightiness and depth it simply doesn't have, laying on the pretense that stands in stark juxtaposition to the pulpy, nonsensical story he's telling. It gets worse when the pig man starts speaking: "Fools and dreamers profess that faith defeats the eclipse of their humannn-ity... but know the cimmeriannn onnne wil always always impregnnn-ate the hollows of its quarry!" - what?! The pig man goes on and on like this for pages and those aren't mistypes either, the words are stretched out and divided up on purpose, so reading it is even more painful. Pig man's dialogue is definitely the worst dialogue I've ever read in a comic published this year by a wide margin. Flanagan's art is the best thing about the comic except his character designs are sorely lacking in originality. His Cryptozoic Man character is literally a patchwork of well known mythical creatures like Nessie and Bigfoot while his monster designs look like things a bored teenager would doodle in his notebook during a dull class - an Alien Mother-like head with octopus tentacles coming out of its eyes, blood spattered everywhere, etc. etc. yawn. His aliens look exactly like Greys while his pig man character IS Grant Morrison's Professor Pyg from Batman. Cryptozoic Man #1 is a poorly put-together, wannabe mysterious and edgy comic that instead comes off as a complete mess. I appreciate that not all first issues have to establish character or the storyline, but it should accomplish something and I'm not sure what this first issue does other than irritate with it's sloppiness and stop me from reading the series any further. Cryptozoic Man #1 is less of a horror comic and more of a horrible comic. Published by Dynamite, Cryptozoic Man #1 by Bryan Johnson and Walter Flanagan is out now