Sheesh. Some comics are so bad that it feels like an annoying waste of time just to copy down the list of "credits" at the beginning of my review, let alone to write a whole review. The Sect is one such comic. It’s also a comic that you end up wishing you had taken a closer look at it the store, so you wouldn’t have wasted $3 on it. It’s the kind of comic that your editor might send you as a Bad Indie Book from the latest convention. Have I managed to convey to you just how much of a dissapointment this comic is? The Sect is like a bad martial arts movie... You know, the kind where you’re not sure who anyone really is, and they’re all spending too much time running around doing things that you don’t quite understand and cussing each other out and generally not spending enough time getting into cool, well-choreographed fights? In fact, The Sect even has that slightly-disjointed flow of a poorly edited martial arts movie. It jumps around too much between scenes and leaves you going "Huh?". Anyway, the story centers around several characters. The "hero" of the story spends most of his time standing around holding out a small sign on a cord around his neck that says "Please take me to this address". He may or may not be mentally retarded. He’s definitely ugly, but that could just be because Mook Lim has that whole annoying bad sense of proportion/anatomy that drove me away from Dreamwave’s "Shidima" series. There’s also a prostitute on the run, the little boy that falls in love with her, and some swordman. Oh, and the gang of bad guys that want the prostitute back and get beaten up by the nameless hero. Ho hum. Still with me? The Sect was originally published in Korea, and seems to be set in some sort of semi-modern Oriental type country. I couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be Korea, an alternate world type Korea, or some all together different place. Adding to this confusing was Powerhouse’s bad decision to "Americanize" the book by tossing in references to Mountain Dew and LilKim. The one good thing that The Sect has going for it is REALLY high quality printing! Full color on heavy-duty magazine style paper... Geez, the inner pages may very well be thicker than the covers on Generic Comic Book. If The Sect is your type of comic, then you’re definitely getting your money’s worth in that aspect... $2.95 for a glossy, full-cover book is definitly one of the best deals I’ve seen lately. Oh yes, one last thing... The Sect is billed as being "funny". Well, if your idea of humor is a grown man knocking a kid upside the head to steal a soda, bad guys screaming "retard" at the hero and beating whores to death, maybe it is funny. I, personally, did not find myself smiling once. This comic has some *serious* violence, naughty language (for the record, just writing "what the fu . . ." is really lame, anyone who can figure out what you mean already knows what the word is, so either write it in all the way or not at all), references to prostitution, major violence against women, and some minor violence against a kid, oh yes, and slurs against the Developmentally Disabled. All you need is someone barbecuing a cat and shouting ethnic slurs and you’ve run the whole politically incorrect gamut!

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