Review by Ian Keogh

November follows the lives of three women, unconnected before the grim events of a November night when everything kicks off in the city. Dee is pretty well defined by her assorted problems, but has at least survived them all. Emma-Rose is the very definition of the innocent woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, but courageous and resourceful. Kay works for the police and found herself all too easily corrupted, but now she’s looking for redemption. They met each other at the end of The Voice on the End of the Phone.

Letterer Kurt Ankeny has designed a distinctive script for each leading character’s narrative captions, and when they’re all together that pays off. The backgrounds have been presented, so rather than leaping back and forth and supplying glimpses, The Mess We’re In is a more conventional piece of storytelling, yet only slightly so, and that’s only possible via the groundwork previously supplied. Here Matt Fraction starts with the situation that ended the previous volume, looks at what one character does, rewinds, replays the scene through different eyes, then does it again. Simple, no?

All the way through Elsa Charretier on art and Matt Hollingsworth on colours have made for a fantastic combination, and that continues. It’s not just more of the same, though, as for the first time there’s some brightness, which comes as a real shock. It’s like the reverse of Blue Velvet, where the white fences and greenery open up into the sordid reality. Elsewhere there’s more great injury art, Charretier really piling on the agony, and some astonishingly well choreographed action.

From the beginning November’s been a slow and confusing build, and Fraction never spells out what Dee was up to in the first volume, but this shining culmination repays most headscratching.

In one sense it’s strange that there’s not yet been a compilation edition, but let’s give designer Rian Hughes some props. Anyone who wonders what a designer brings to a graphic novel should pick up a copy of November, note the distinctive covers, the thought given to cover and spine colour over four volumes, the wire fencing endpapers and the slightly debossed title. Image how good all four volumes will look next to each other on a shelf. Then take a look at a standard Marvel graphic novel. There’s a reason Hughes wins awards.