Review by Frank Plowright

Without wanting to give too much away, Lauren Greene’s not in a great place as these two chapters begin. Within just over a month she’s quit her Detroit police job on principle, has since lost another job, and has become involved with shady thugs at the tech company where her mother worked as a cleaner. As of the end to Vol. 2, she’s also inherited her mother’s dog Sankó and the strange morphing form of artificial life that attached to her mother.

There are fantastical elements to Wolf’s Head, but creator Von Allan’s greater interest is in Lauren as a person and what she’s going through. He delivers a fine portrait of someone refusing to cave under pressure, but there’s little respite for her as the problems keep piling up.

After three volumes Allan’s style of art is integral to Lauren and her world. The people are stylised, but consistent, and there’s attention to detail in the many small panels seen primarily in long view. What’s set in a deliberately real world also has moments of sheer surreality as the artificial life form twists into abstract shapes, somewhat the quirky contrast to everything else. Characters are well designed to be distinct and easily recognised, and all have clear motivations. The least convincing of them, though, is highly strung tech genius Jeremy Hamilton. What he wants is clear, and his fragility is intended as a form of mental illness, but changes to his personality occur too rapidly.

For all the focus on Lauren’s experiences, a crime story with an SF intrusion has been running since the first volume, and Allan brings that to a head here very effectively, avoiding the obvious paths a revenge story might take. The finale has action, but is violence the answer? Lauren knows it’s not.

After the fireworks an underplayed ending leads into Vol. 4, which is the first not to have appeared in hardcover as We All Want to Change the World. Any reader hooked from the start ought to be very pleased at how the first story finishes and the possibilities it opens for the future.