Big Man Plans Series Review

This review is going to be about a book that is not for everyone. In fact if you are under the age of 16 I would suggest you not pick it up, or allow your children under the age of 16 to pick it up. There is some pretty foul language, sex acts and ultra – violence (thanks Burgess). This week I am going to talk about the four issue Image miniseries Big Man Plans, written by Tim Wiesch and Eric Powell, Eric also did the art work for the series as well.

This series is a four part series, which is nice and refreshing. I am used to ongoing series or 6 – 8- 12 part stories that take extra time to come out. This was a quick story that packs a lot of punch. Honestly I also don’t think I could have read many more issues. This story is brutal. It’s about a dwarf in seventies seeking bloody vengeance for wrongs committed against him in the past. And there are a lot of them. He has led a hard life, as one would expect from someone born different, in the United States in the 50’s/60’s, in the South.

I really enjoyed this book. There is something about the idea of the Army using a group of people with disabilities to do secret missions in confined spaces that I found really intriguing. This is something that happened to Big Man in the book, and there are some great moments throughout the series but the section where he talks about his time in Vietnam was my favorite. It also serves to show a little bit more of his character and why he reacts to things a certain way. It paints a broken man being broken down further in P.O.W camps. Big Man is a product of violence and hatred, and when he’s crossed he will destroy you.

However there is a sense at one point that this book becomes shocking for the sake of being shocking. It may have been around the 200^th use of the word “F***” or the 50^th image of someone getting their asses royally and bloodily beat by a dwarf who just finished having sex with some girl he picked up in a bar. I just found that after awhile, especially by the last gore filled issue, I was bored with Big Man devastating people left and right.

This book was well written and tells a great story of someone who is different than we are used to seeing. The art is nice, I am not a huge fan but the story was good enough to keep me around. I found it to be a bit much at times though so this book gets 3 out of 5.

In a side note I am half done the 150^th issue of Fables, the series ending, and it’s great. I will not be reviewing it as I could write a book about what this series means to me… but just go get it for yourself. This series is one of the reasons I started buying comics again. The series and this issue of it, being half read, already gets 5/5.