This was a little disappointing as the first volume in a series widely touted as innovative. Of course, looking at something in 2010 is not going to be the same as looking at in 1994 when it was first published but it does not stand the test of time in the way that the Sandman series of Neil Gaiman or the work of Alan Moore has done. 
 Morrison is not stupid. He plays well with the tropes of Chaos Magick (never mentioned but central to the thinking behind the book) and with the psychogeography of London. 
 He is well within an English tradition of mixing magic and public culture, one that has been a highly fertile source for American popular culture and whose literary output comprises such luminaries as Ackroyd, Sinclair and, most recently, with 'Kraken', China Mieville. 
 But the graphics are conventional and Morrison himself can be wordy. He stretches things out a bit on occasions so that you end up asking 'where's the beef?'. No graphic novel should ever permit the stifling of a yawn as one does while listening to the self-indulgent wittering of 'Old Tom'. It also leaps around too much with an odd rhythm - too much meandering in one part and too much jump-cutting in another. 
 I would like to think that this was some deliberate strategy to mimic Chaos Magick theory but, if so, it fails. Chaos Magick does not work through external but through internal narrative. Here, you never get the chance to sustain an engagement that will shift your mental gear into new paradigms - you are, too often, being preached at, the exact antithesis of the Chaos mentality. 
 So much good work has been done around the idea of a second magical and sinister London under the skin of the one that we see (if we are resident) every day that this one seems pale in retrospect. This first volume is a violent and post-modern concoction that owes a great deal to the spirit of Foucault - a sort of creative version of those near-contemporaneous graphic accounts of philosophy provided as cribs by Icon Books and others. 
 The unfairness of this review is the unfairness of over fifteen years of shelf life. There are striking images and ideas but there is something adolescent and gratuitous about it ... a text to show how Vertigo managed to open up new themes and ideas for the generation born in the 1970s, much different from Alan Moore's own embedment in that same dystopian decade, but not one that truly 'enlightens'.