Crime SuspenStories: The Christmas Cookie Comic

As I read through the various comics in Crime SuspenStories, I couldn't help but feel a little bit like I do a few weeks before Christmas. Now, I don't mean that I became giddy with the excitement of unwrapping a gift, nor do I mean to imply that I spend every December lying awake at night waiting for a psychopath in a red suit and carrying an ax to come stumbling into my bedroom. No, the feeling I got was that of endlessly stuffing Christmas cookies into my mouth one after another, hardly noticing any difference between each individual cookie. Each cookie, though shaped slightly differently and frosted with a different color frosting, tastes the same; the cookie and the frosting always taste the same. I felt the same way about Crime SuspenStories. Though each individual comic followed a different plot line, I felt like each story followed the same general outline. An amoral character would be introduced, that character would do something wrong, and at the end of the story, one or more characters would die. Though there was variation in the specific details, after about the third story, I found myself bored by the routine since I was easily able to predict the generic endings of most of the stories. Now, at this point I feel I should defend myself just a little bit; I don't mean to imply that I wouldn't enjoy sitting at a window in a cozy room with a fire, watching the snowy world through a window and feasting on vast quantities of same-tasting cookies. As long as each cookie was cooked to perfection, I would enjoy them. I might even take a second to inspect the little details in the frosting. All I mean to imply is that as I bit into the cookies Crime SuspenStories had to offer, I was disappointed to find that the bottoms had been burned and after eating three or four, I had had my fill and found myself craving something different.