Review: MIND MGMT Volume 1- The Manager

Quick Summary

Pros: The main storyline is exciting and involves a satisfying mystery. A larger conspiracy is built in the background that fills the series with more intrigue and potential. The diversity of mental powers displayed here is great to see.

Cons: The artwork is subpar and slightly diminishes the reading experience.

Overall: This is a great volume that is filled with excitement and secrets. It starts out by exploring a single mystery but soon evolves into a mind-bending story about psychic agents and complex conspiracies. The only thing holding the volume back is the art, though even this does little to diminish the appeal of the story. Anyone looking for a book about secret government organizations or a tantalizing mystery should check out this volume.

Story

MIND MGMT Volume 1: The Manager is an innovative and unique comic that details the activities of a psychically-powered, clandestine government agency. Writer Matt Kindt uses this setting as the staging point for stories about thrilling espionage, emotional deception, and tantalizing conspiracy. The entire thing is a thrill ride that gives readers resolution in some places and leaves them on wonderful cliffhangers in others. Portions of the book feel like Men in Black and other portions feel like the Matrix, but all of it is entertaining. Overall, this is a very optimistic start to the series.

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The focus of The Manager is split between two separate, but equally entertaining, storylines that follow two separate, but equally entertaining mysteries. The first is contained within this volume and involves a plane full of people suffering from a shared case of sudden amnesia. This storyline follows the main character, Maru, as she attempts to discover what happened.

This mystery is structured well and remains interesting from start to finish. As it progresses, elements from the volume’s beginning start to make sense in a way that is truly satisfying to see play out. The mystery is also entertaining because it is relatively open and shut; readers know exactly what happened by the time they finish this book. This gives readers a sense of completion while still leaving more mystery to be discovered.

The second storyline introduces this additional mystery and involves the conspiracy Maru uncovers while investigating. This conspiracy follows one man’s attempt to dismantle MIND MGMT permanently and two agents’ violent attempts to stop him.

This portion of the book is just as exciting and addicting as the rest of the book. It creates a sense that MIND MGMT is a series with lofty goals that are sure to come into play as the series develops. It also makes room for these goals to develop, which fills subsequent volumes with additional potential. Plus, it gives a fun cliffhanger ending that helps generate additional excitement for the future.

Another positive comes from how creative Matt Kindt is in creating the various mental powers that are exhibited throughout this book. Instead of going with genre standards, like mind control or telekinesis, this volume demonstrates characters with a wide array of powers. This can range from something more innocuous, like a healing factor, to something more bizarre, like the ability to manipulate media or alter people’s perception of a single object. Seeing the backstory and powers of each agent is nearly as entertaining as the actual story itself. Hopefully subsequent volumes continue to introduce more of these unique abilities.

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Art

The art in MIND MGMT: The Manager is the volume’s Achilles’ heel. On the positive side, Matt Kindt’s artwork is well-structured and pairs well with the writing. Plus, the messy and gruff art style suits the volume’s purposefully confusing storyline.

Unfortunately, these positives do not make up for the negatives. The biggest negative is that characters and locations lack detail in many places where detail would be appreciated. This makes characters hard to identify, occasionally because they look too similar to another character or because they look too dissimilar to how they looked on a previous page. I often found myself flipping back and forth just to confirm that a character was who I thought they were. This hampers the reading process and is one of the few major flaws throughout this book.

Continuity

MIND MGMT Volume 1: The Manager is the first volume in the MIND MGMT series.

The story here continues in MIND MGMT Volume 2: The Futurist (Review).