Neil Young's Greendale

By Josh Dysart
Vertigo, $19.99, 160 pages

Sometimes, taking an album and basing a story on it is a good idea. Neil Young’s Greendale is not one of those good ideas. The book follows the story of Sun Greendale, a young woman with powerful abilities, and how she becomes a force for Nature. The problem is that this book should have been released a decade or so ago; its politically-correct environmental message just doesn’t ring true. This is not to say that being pro-environment is bad; it’s just that the message here is so over-the-top that even those in the choir it’s singing to won’t take it seriously. The art style is nicely detailed, and it’s nice to see a range of normal people rather than the usual comic book characters (normally you see heroic proportions or caricatures, but the people here are ones that you could actually meet in a bar), but the story needs to be taken down a notch. It’s a beautiful book, and the story is a powerful allegory, but it’s too over-the-top to take seriously. If not for making the message loud as a bomb, it would have been an excellent book.

Reviewed by Jamais Jochim