REVIEW: Everything Is Fine (graphic novel, vol. 1) by Mike Birchall

Everything Is Fine is a dystopian graphic novel series. I bought my copy of this volume new.

Review:

This is the story of a couple living in an ordinary suburban neighborhood. Everyone wears cute animal masks on their heads, but somehow this is ordinary as well. Everything is fine, even though it clearly isn't - everyone's being constantly monitored, "freedom" can only be attained if you sell out your neighbors, and Winston the dog has been dead for a while.

I was hesitant to try this because the art wasn't really to my taste. It's simple and bland, and if you just flip through the volume you might think that people's animal heads are their actual faces, so all facial expressions are uniformly happy and cute in a stale sort of way. It works very well for the story, though, so I'm glad I gave this a shot.

This first volume raises a lot more questions than it answers. We don't know how or why everything ended up this way. There are no children anywhere, and characters go out of their way to avoid acknowledging anything unpleasant. Whatever it is seems to have been going on for a while, because Winston was pretty decomposed, but not so long that folks didn't remember how things used to be.

Considering how little effort Maggie, the wife, made to hide the signs that she no longer wanted to pretend everything was fine, it was tough to believe that no one confronted her earlier, and I didn't really expect her to be alive by the end of the volume. Volume 2 may strain my sense of disbelief even more, but I'm intrigued enough by whatever horror is going on under the surface of all of this to want to continue on.

Extras:

A note from the author, plus bonus pages showing comparisons of the original Webtoon artwork vs. the remastered artwork, and some bonus comics ("demonic mode," "headless mode," and "Victorian mode") originally made to interest people in the author's Patreon.