Peerless Poe is a detective who likes to drink, smoke, and cuss. Turns out he is also the descendant of Cain, the world’s “first murderer”--and he bears a birthmark that attracts supernatural trouble. There is an entire society of descendants, however, and they are all charged with righting the wrongs of their ancestor by destroying whatever nasty monsters come along. As the enemies multiplied over the years, the “Order of the Sacred Method” was formed to combat the evil hordes. So, yeah, the “Method Men.”

This book is a mess.

So Peerless Poe--he’s the main character, remember--left the order because of some bad blood between him and his girlfriend’s dad, who were also members of the Order. Now he’s doing his own work, away from the Order.

We join Peerless in the sewer, hunting a monster described by some kids in the neighborhood as a “big red alligator,” a story ignored by the local police. Having seen the crazy stuff he’s seen, Peerless Poe knows there is actually some sort of monster down there.

Tromping through the sewer, Peerless lets more than a few cusswords fly, but the thing is, they are all printed like this: “S—t!”

It’s not exactly a Supreme Court case for censorship. It’s just stupid. The book isn’t filled with cusswords, but they show up enough to make me wonder what was the point of giving them the dash-dash treatment. If you have a book that cannot be published with curse words, then don’t have your characters curse.

Peerless runs into some monsters he wasn’t expecting--such as, consequently, his old boss, Occisor Albeit. Let the confusion begin.

From there the story becomes very muddled. The poorly developed plot shows through as the book advances at a sloppy pace.

Actually, sloppy is the perfect word to describe this book. There are misspelled words throughout. In one case, I had to guess what the word should be. When talking to one of his “celibate descendants,” Peerless mentions that he wants to be “getting dome” before the mission.

I’m guessing that he meant “getting some” since the S and D are neighbors on the keyboard. Perhaps “dome” is just a slang euphemism for something else that I don’t get.

The two men meet up with another descendant of Cain, Occisor Despite. Their goal is to destroy Lilith, the first woman God created and who abandoned Adam and the paradise that was Eden. She is trying to connect Heaven and Hell to Earth--and that would be bad, so they need to stop her.

If you happen to read this book and haven’t given up by this point, I commend you.

Clifford Smith--better known by his stage name, Method Man, as a member of the hip-hop Wu Tang Clan--supplied the concept for this book--but I’m not sure what exactly that means. My guess would be he told David Atchison, who wrote the script, to include something about alcohol, weed, girls, and make the “mark of Cain” the Wu-Tang symbol rotated 180-degrees so it resembles a C, instead of a W.

The rest of the book feels like it’s padded with Atchison’s interests. Sadly, though, it also feels like it was written in a couple of days. It also looks as if it were drawn in the same period of time.

The art here fails to be sequential, and often leaves the reader wondering how characters got from one position to the next. While I was reading, in fact, I found myself realizing that I usually don’t spend as much time writing about the art aspect of comics because when it works, it doesn’t distract. What most readers are looking for is a book where the words work in perfect conjunction with the art--leading to a smooth experience.

Almost every panel here looks like a sketch done in maybe five minutes, something that is only reinforced when you get to the back of the book and see the character designs, which are drawn much more aptly.

Reading this book made me wonder what the parties involved were thinking. I could only come up with one answer. Actually, a quote from a Wu-Tang Clan song sums it up best, “Cash rules everything around me, C.R.E.A.M., get the money, dolla-dolla bill ya’ll.”

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