One of the truisms of the critiquing business is that negative reviews are an important part of reviews, if only to warn people away from movies, books, and the like that don’t work. It’s not an aspect of reviewing I utilize very often, partly because I’m a fairly tolerant reader who can often find something worthwhile about the comics I read, and partly because if a comic doesn’t have something worthwhile in it, I seldom want to waste my time reading through it. However, there are times when reviewers have to pick up that sledgehammer and lay into strips that are intrinsically flawed.

Alone in a Crowd is one of those strips. The problem is that cartoonist Thomas Szewc doesn’t seem to know what sort of comic he’s writing. I mean, it starts out as a childhood friendship comic, with a short blonde ditz named Hope who pays the local bully to let her talk to him (no doubt because her insanity and inanity drives anyone who isn’t being paid away). When she meets another girl, Faith, who for some bizarre reason has kitty ears (described as, and I kid you not, a birth defect) (I mean, why not go the whole 90 yards and have it be the unfortunate result of the kid getting her head caught in a mechanical… rice picker?) and who (despite her better judgment) ends up introducing Hope to her guardian, Sara.

So far we’ve got all the ingredients for the sort of comic that would force diabetics to take insulin injections and probably inflict cavities on the rest of us. I’ve run into this sort of comic before, and properly done they’re the sort of thing that drives some people into fits, and gives others the warm fuzzies. So when we’re introduced to Faith’s aunt, Desirae Passions, and given a multi-page explanation of her history as a porn star before she started up her own pornography studio to create porn that didn’t treat its stars as objects… yes, you heard me right. Partway into the story, we learn that the kitty-eared kid’s aunt is a porn star, and on how she was abused by the people who hired her.

This is what I call a (and please excuse my language here) “what the fuck” moment. I can just see some parent reading through the first dozen comics and going “ah, a kid comic!” and letting little Sally start to read it. The parent doesn’t want to suffer from added cavities, and is probably being careful to try and avoid Type 2 Diabetes here, so it’s perhaps understandable that she didn’t read all the way through. So imagine her surprise when little Sally comes out, looking puzzled, and asks “what’s a porn star?” (Or worse, gets a phonecall from her daughter’s school because the kid didn’t ask Mommy but went to her teacher instead.)

The comic even comments on this, with Faith and Hope being sent to Faith’s bedroom while the rest of us are tortured with this poorly-imagined sob story. And there, Hope comes up with one of her brief moments of lucidity by suggesting that maybe Faith’s sister and aunt are talking about things too old for them. And then we’re brought back to the tradition of lunacy by Hope saying “Or… maybe she’s plotting to overthrow the President and doesn’t want you involved as an accomplice!” I swear, this girl is Pinky and the Brain, combined.

Okay. The comic has artwork that doesn’t make you want to gouge out your eyeballs. And either story alone would work; Desirae’s little story and the object lesson of always reading the contract is an important one… and while in some places nauseating, the childhood friendship and two loners coming together could be a worthwhile comic. But this is one instance where you don’t mix the two. This comic is not child-safe. Nor is it really something most adults would indulge in for a long period of time. It takes elements that could work alone, but which together becomes unworkable.

Think of it as like magnesium and water. Both have their place and their value. But if you mix the two, you get an explosion. If Szewc were to relaunch the comic and either removed the Desirae storyline or eliminated the Faith/Hope aspect… perhaps even with the focus of the comic on Sara, an older sister-turned-single mom, then it might be worth reading. But as it is now? I strongly recommend against this comic.