As a person, I have my own history of violence, and that history has led me to become obsessed, as a thinker and author, with violence as a concept. I see it everywhere. I dwell on it, am awed by it, wonder about it, write about it, dream about it, nightmare about it, loathe it and love it in turns. Thus, when I pick up a book with the title A History of Violence, I expect to read something that engages with violence consciously, something that doesn't simply use violence for visceral gratification but has a plan for the violence, is using it to say something (even if that something is something I don't like). 
 John Wagner's A History of Violence says many things about violence, but what bothers me is that I never once felt like the things being said were intentional. I felt like Luke in the cave on Dagobah: everything in the cave was there because I brought it with me. 
 Wagner's writing left me hollow and sad. He was merely telling a story, one he needed to tell, perhaps, but only to move a plot B to C, then back to A, then C to D. He seemed totally disconnected from the thematic life of his work, and I felt abandoned by him as I made my journey through the text. As I write this I think that in itself, that abandonment by the author, is a unique and potentially powerful authorial authorial -- but I don't like being the object of that action. 
 Moreover, I despair that someone could use the sort of violence that appears in this graphic novel with what seems to be flippant disregard of its power. Similar violence occurs in David Fincher's film Se7en (in fact, Wagner blatantly stole one of the seven killings from that movie for this book), but Fincher's use of violence feels conscious, pointed, thematically aware, and that makes all the difference for me. 
 Vince Locke's is scratchingly, noirishly lovely, well suited to the bleak world Wagner has written, but it only added to the alienation I felt. 
 I know I am going to have to come back to this book in the future and give it another read simply because it made me feel so strongly. I didn't enjoy this book at all. I put it down feeling angry, isolated and disgusted. I wish I felt like those feelings were intentional rather than incidental.