Starred Review Image Comics' promising experiment in format is this oversize book matching the content density, gravitas, and production value of a graphic novel with the slimmer page count and monthly serialized storytelling of a standard comic. Snyder, the much-lauded Batman scribe, counting on the relatively short wait for the next episode, suggests just enough of what's going on to keep you hooked to the story of Jonah Cooke. Though hundreds of years old, Cooke is haunted by a psychological trauma early in his life that he's carried into a rural future that is somehow postapocalyptic, despite the fact that the few people left appear to be immortal. In both the comics portion (the story's present) and the passages of illustrated text (flashbacks to Cooke's past), the sense of edgy half-understanding and uncertainty is distilled with perfect, smudged beauty by Lemire's art. His work here exemplifies his highly personal style, an achingly melancholy expanse of lushly natural settings with a quiet and pervasive uneasiness roiling beneath. He populates it with fragile, angular characters whose eyes are etched with all the anxiety that this world, or any imagined one, could possibly offer. The success of such an experiment is, ultimately, in the quality of the story, and Snyder and Lemire make this a resounding one.