Product Description: Love, war, family and the best hummus recipe in New York City Scooter enthusiast and spoiled brat, Olive Yassin, delivers food for her parents' award-winning Middle Eastern restaurant, Couscous Express. She hates it. It's boring. She would much rather be hanging out with her courier-mercenary boyfriend, Moustafa. But when the local branch of the stylish and dangerous Turkish Scooter Mafia make a move against the restaurant, she knows she has to do something, anything, to protect her family. Couscous Express combines delicious food, automatic weapons fire, and scooter culture into a hectic, adrenaline-fueled story of love, family, war, and the best hummus recipe in New York City.
Another great one in Brian Wood's NYC It's fun, fast and exciting. You get a quick adventure with Special and Mustafa from Wood's The Couriers series helping out Mustafa' girlfriend Olive's family. It's a good popcorn movie in comic book form. Enjoy it!
nice suprise... I discovered Brian Wood a few weeks back, starting with Channel Zero (in itself a really impressive book), and it didn't take long to find this. I'm not sure which one impressed me more.
Couscous Express isn't high concept, it has a simple plot, simple artwork, nothing to fancy in the writing... but its the way it comes together which seals the deal - the characterisation is excellent, and the artwork (although a little consistant) always manages to bring it out in a way that more complicated artwork might not.
The later couriers books (the two i've read, at any rate) are fun reads, but they don't really live up to this - there isn't nearly as much to draw the reader in, or make the reader care what happens to the characters in those books then there is here. The story has more nuances, the artwork is much less consistant but works just as well, if not better, for its simplicity and seemingly random style changes, and its nice to have such a flawed protagonist. No-one will ever look up to Olive Yassin, she certainly isn't a role model, but everyone will recognise her personality...
Anyway, my largest complaint is that the story is perhaps a little too short, but then maybe thats just wishful thinking - I can't see what you'd add to it, and you certainly couldn't take anything away from it. Take a look... you might be pleasantly suprised.
Gripless Tale Having enjoyed Brian Wood's work on Channel Zero, I had no problem spending the money to pick up Couscous Express. I ended up being pretty disappointed with this comic's listless tale of an unlikeable girl who can't seem to ruin lives fast enough.
As a whole, the story feels very shallow and trivial. There was little emotion put into this book. The plot is very obvious, and the characters seem to have no interest in what they're doing.
The art is decent, but stylistically changes at random for seemingly no reason.
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