2.5 stars. If you've never read a noir story before, this might strike you better than it did me, but I've read a lot, and despite efforts to do something different, the moral exhaustion of the protagonist is reflected in the artistic exhaustion of the noir genre as reflected here. If you've never read a graphic novel before, you probably won't be able to follow this well at all. Apart from word balloons, there is no text--no thought balloons, no sound effects, no narrative captions. This is a lot less unusual than it used to be, but it does mean that a lot of signals comics can provide are absent here. I found it particularly jarring to be reading scenes with significant gunplay but with no sound effects. The one exception is a few clicks that come through a phone line, thereby confirming our protagonist's expectation that his phone line is tapped. I suppose Lloyd had no choice about that one, and I suppose that even if you establish a rule (or practice) for yourself, you can choose to violate it, but it actually stuck out more than it should because it's unique. I was also not enamored of the mixed media element sof the art--especially the computer manipulations. For all I know, the whole thing was drawn on a computer, but in some panels, the computer's intervention was very visible, and that's about as effective in comics as bad CGI is in movies--IMO, anyway. As for the plot ... well, corrupt cop in a corrupt city, investigating the slaughter of a bunch of gangsters that has set off a war between cops and crooks, learns that the corruption runs deeper than he thought ... and you probably have an idea, more or less, of where that goes. He also has a recurring nightmare tied to repressed childhood memories, so we have the mysterious past thing as well. The metaphor of being swallowed by a whale rather hits us over the head with it. Anyway, not bad, at times nice to look at (Lloyd often shows a great eye for panel and page composition), though, again, those not fairly familiar with comics design may occasionally be baffled about what they are looking at, at least initially.