Graphic novel of the week: Should you follow 'Unfollow'?

It's the most intriguing idea for a contemporary comic book series I've seen in a long time: A dying social media billionaire flies 140 random users (140 characters, get it?) to his private island. 

He tells his guests he's dividing up his $18 billion fortune between them -- but if any of them should die, everyone's share of the pie (dispensed monthly in slices of $100,000 and up) will grow larger. And one user just happened to bring a bag full of guns. 

That's the premise of Unfollow, a Vertigo comic series that launched late last year. The first graphic novel, which collects issues one through six, releases next week. So compelling is this concept that a TV development deal was announced almost as soon as the first issue hit the shelves. 

So does the execution live up to the promise of the premise? Not quite, not yet. Like many a comic book series, Unfollow is having a rocky start that may yet even out down the road. (Hell, even Sandman took about 10 issues to find its footing.) 

For now, the problem is familiar to any social media user -- Unfollow is as unfocused, disjointed, and self-consciously-trying-to-be-shocking as the average Twitter feed. 

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

With such an outlandish concept, the smart thing to do would be to make our point-of-view characters -- there are five so far -- as much like ordinary schlubs as possible. After all, that's supposed to be what the experiment is all about; to see if the promise of untold riches will turn regular people into killers in the style of Battle Royale.

Unfortunately, that's only true for one of our heroes -- Dave, a guy from St. Louis who participated in the 2014 protests in Ferguson (which feel a little shoehorned in here in an attempt to be edgy, but whatever). Since neighborhood thugs consider holding his sister to ransom when they hear he's about to become wealthy, Dave has our sympathy.

The same is not true for the other POV characters, who feel too remote to be interesting and too ridiculous to be realistic. Most annoying of all is a guy named Akira, a Japanese author and avant-garde artist. Akira is supposed to be someone who amputated his own legs and replaced them with robotic appendages to make an obscure point. What a wacky guy!

Oh, and he also apparently wrote a novel with the same subject as Unfollow itself, leaving open the question of whether the selection of characters was truly random. Feel free to roll your eyes here.

The writer, Rob Williams, seems to do a lot of this sort of thing -- sabotaging the very idea of his story before we've had a chance to settle into it. The billionaire (spoiler alert) dies before long, offstage, apparently leaving the experiment in the hands of a psycho nutjob named Rubenstein with a mask and a propensity for violence. 

Which would be fine if we didn't already have someone filling the same role, a standard-issue gun-toting religious zealot named Deacon, who turns out to be an Iraq vet. We've seen his movie before. Even Dave can't just be Dave -- he has to see a ghostly panther out of the corner of his eyes everywhere he goes. 

All that said, the series shows promise. The art by Mike Dowling and Quinton Winter is as clear as the story is thus far muddy. And hopefully Williams will get over his initial need to shock us, and start focusing on what works in the narrative. 

After all, the 140 characters are already dying at a rate of about one per issue -- so if one isn't working, it's child's play to kill him off.