NEW THINK 3.0 - Review

 

It’s a Jewish New Year! It’s a New Moon! It’s a new day to read a newish comic series asking you to think anew. It’s New Think 3.0! From a somewhat new comic book publisher. So, nu? Is it good? Nu is Yiddish for ‘okay, well’ in case ya didn’t know. In other Yiddish news I finally got a match on my exclusive dating app with some shiksa who will probably never respond to my mundane message. Nothing new there!

 

The previous issues of this anthology series had a cautionary commentary on the vacuum suck that is our phones followed by a cutesy fable on the need to speak your truth even if putzy monarchs force you to live in a glass house and give up your privacy. As I was zipping back home from Brooklyn on a flight back to La La Land the cover depicting a digitized Marilyn Monroe in her iconic white dress over the steam grate pose positioned now over a cell phone seemed the perfect accompaniment.

 

Before I could get into it the cute passenger in the seat next to me for whatever reason took an interest in me and ended up chatting me the entire flight home. Turns out she’s a member of a Chinese Girl Group that sings 90s R&B style songs, they’re good! Anyway, out of all the things we talked about one of them was about me needing to get a TikTok account so I can begin to connect with Gen Z. According to her Gen Z would looooove me and would help blow up my upcoming one man show. I was intrigued. Actually was about to get tikky with it but since Insta is always listening to you even on airplane mode the next day I got this video right at the top of my feed:

 

 

How dare you consider a competitor Issac! Here have some more reels with girls wiggling their wigglies in your face. I swear I looked at one (maybe two...or three) wiggly reel and now every chance Insta gets it has wiggly girls on my feed. That’s all they are. Girls in bikinis reach to press record and then just jiggle their stuff. Is this a thing? What is the purpose of these girls? How does this make anyone money? Is it just to look inside my mouth as I gape? Are you getting dental data? Or do you want to see if you can make me walk into a street sign?

 

Yes this is a comic book review. Okay, look, this issue wasn’t really a story; it was a commentary.  A commentary on the pervasive intrusive all encompassing hold a phone can have over your life. Written in the first person of said generic phone it wound its way through the myriad of ways it wove its web around your existence and nudged you along to its grand design. Problem is, you got the sentiment within a few pages, but it kept going and going and going alllll the way until the end. It was quite similar to the first issue of this ‘series’. Got it. Phones be creeping and brain tweaking but for goodness sake give me a plot. A Protagonist. Some semblance of a story. Had Greg Hurwitz built off of this concept with a few pages of the evil phone intent and given us a narrative, some obstacles, anything to make us feel someone or something was out there fighting the fight then maybe this could have been a powerful book.

 

As it stands it’s just a treatise. It’s a diatribe at a Poetry Slam. Yes it gets a bunch of snaps and mm hmmms from the crowd but I’m not sitting next to a boho babe with ripped jeans, natty hair, a nose-ring and a butterfly tat who will reject me due to being too square. I’m sitting next to my doggie in my Lay-Z-Boy flipping through these pages begging for a story. Didn’t get one. Can’t go on. Love me some good indie tales but my new thinking on letting go of what doesn’t work in my life includes this series. Yeah, I think not.

 

I didn't even get me some Marilyn although I'm sure her great granddaughter is jiggling somewhere on my insta feed if I stop and [BONK] Wow. Street signs are much more sturdier than they look.

 

Rating: 5.5

Verdict: Drop