Philosopher Rex

Philosopher Rex #1-6

by Ian Miller, Jason Miller, Geraldo Borges (Artist)

130 Pages! Meet Dr. Ishmael Stone, Philosopher, detective, monster-hunter, primes inter pares of a shadowy network of supernatural guardians sworn to shelter the world from the Infernal Orders. Philosopher Rex opens at a moment of crisis as the old orders are fragmenting and the Philosophers dividing into rival camps. Stone and his comrades on one side of the battle, the craven Philip Delacroix on the other. Complicating just when Stone and his associates need them most, their various abilities are inexplicably on the wane.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics

130 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 7, 2010

Reviews

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graphic horror novel. Looks like a series that was stillborn. Co-author Jason Miller has an excellent two book gothic mystery series "Little Egypt" which takes place in the southern end of Illinois.

[Rick · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was pretty bad. Let's start with the good... the art was serviceable and did what it needed to do with a few nice splash pages. The story had a few interesting concepts & characters. But that's about it.

Everything else is a mess. First, you never get to know anything about the group of characters that make up Rex's team. It feels like this is a story pulled from the middle of an ongoing series and you're supposed to know a lot about the characters already... but you don't. Then there's the otherworldly concepts of demons and philosophers and god and their superpowers and everything else. There's no explanation for any of it and no back story. This is writing 101 stuff that's just getting skipped. Lastly, the story resolves itself in a very abrupt, odd way with the climax taking place off-page (which is really weird) and the heroes just leaving. I was scratching my head trying to figure out why anyone would see this as a good idea.

I kind of want my time and money back after giving this a chance. It's efforts like this that make me wonder why I give lesser known books a chance...

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This brief TPB is divided into 6 chapters and the first four tell a decent story about a well over 100 year African American who has been tasked with ridding the world of demons. The ending to the first story was a bit abrupt, and we could have used more information about the network, the prejudice that Ish overcame (we get a flashback to when he returned to his home in the deep South post WWI, and how he dealt with the demon in the first story. The last two chapters were essentially short stories, one of which introduced a supporting character that is featured in the first five chapters.