The cover and description really piqued my interest when I saw this one. But I really underestimated how graphic this one was going to be. Younger me would’ve absolutely loved the raw and unfiltered exploration of the baser aspects of humanity. Present-day me also loved it.

Spoilers and some mentions of mature content ahead!

What I liked:
The story opens with Val, a forty-something single woman who’s waiting for her date in a movie theatre. Unfortunately for her, her date won’t be able to make it. From context, you can tell that she wasn’t really there to watch the film; she just wanted to fool around. But, since she’s left alone and hanging, she doesn’t hesitate to pull out her phone and visit an adult website. The artwork doesn’t shy away from showing you what she’s watching, the lust and longing unapologetically clear in her eyes.

And that is when things take a 180° turn. A lone gunman enters the theatre and starts shooting everyone. He’s apparently playing some kind of online challenge that requires him to get as high a kill count as possible to stay on the leaderboard. The violence is as graphic and brutal as the sex was on Val’s phone. Where the first half of this scene built up desire, the second half subverts it with shock and repulsion. An extreme depiction of the two most base human traits—love and hate.

In the aftermath, Val’s spirit rises from her body. She’s greeted by a different ghost who welcomes her to the afterlife. This isn’t your average afterlife. The spirits that roam in this realm of existence are mere spectators to the show of human existence. While most pass on to the next realm without a thought, many stay back to satiate their curiosity and desire to keep living via the people they watch.

The rest of the story isn’t all that spectacular. More like a conduit for Vaughan to exposit on the philosophy of existence, living, and more. I’m including this in the ‘what I liked’ section because I genuinely loved this exploration, verbal and visual, both. The world fast-forwards to centuries later, the baser needs of humanity still dictating technological development. Where the first scene showed adult websites and mass shootings, the future world shows an extremely advanced version of both.

As Val has been established as a voyeur, she goes around looking to satiate her unfulfilled desires by projecting that satisfaction onto the people she spectates. These acts range from love-making to outright debauchery. But the violent manner of her death has also made her want to witness scenes of extreme violence. If you think about it, we aren’t all that different from Val. After all, sex and violence make for two of the most sellable hooks on the internet, don’t they?

My favorite part of the graphic novel was undoubtedly the characters. Val and Sam like tour guides that you, the reader, are spectating as they, in turn, spectate their world. Over the course of some 344 pages, you learn about their lives, what made them who they were, shedding light on why they might be desiring the things they do in the afterlife. All this again brings us back to the ideas of what it really means to be alive. After all, in an increasingly voyeuristic society that’s addicted to other people’s projected social media appearance, how much are you living your real life?

One could interpret Spectators as a speculative commentary on our modern-day digital isolation. Every app, every megacorporation, is trying its best to keep your attention, even if it is in short spurts of 30 seconds. The adverse effects of social media have resulted in a growth of dissociative mental disorders. Perhaps, in accepting your digital existence, you’re slowly leaving behind your physical one. Social media has made content out of other peoples’ lives, and viewers are mere spectators who dissociate from their own to experience second-hand the lives of others. Much like the ghosts in Spectators.

I can’t say more without spoiling the graphic novel. But I have to admit that the book is not for everyone. The graphic parts are genuinely very graphic. If you can stomach the extreme, you’ll love this one. But if you’re easy to squirm, then you will probably not make it past the first couple of pages.

What I didn’t like:
The story itself is rather flat and straightforward. The character work and resulting discourse were brilliant, but it did leave something to be desired.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the book itself was everything it promised to be. Looking at humanity and our dystopian future through the lens of sex and violence, a convoluted and graphic exploration of longing and living. Yet, something felt missing from the narrative.

Maybe a better-realized world would’ve made the expositions more impactful. Maybe the characters spectating world leaders engaged in baser human desires would’ve felt more compelling than just common people. I’m only speculating here, but those are things I personally believe would’ve elevated the graphic novel from what it is at the moment.

In Conclusion:
Spectators is a beautifully provocative and evocative ‘graphic’ novel that forces you to reflect upon what it really means to be alive in the modern age.

TL;DR:
What I liked: The artwork, the characters, philosophical discourse.
What I didn’t like: The plot and narrative felt wanting.

Though I really enjoyed past works by the author, this one was just not for me. Others may enjoy it, and maybe I just don't get it, but I would have a hard time recommending it unless someone asked for it.

WHAT A WILD VOYEURISTIC ADVENTURE!

Brian K. Vaughan has created a fascinating and unique story spanning millennia. Spectators gets to the heart of what happens next for us as humans. It gives a resounding answer in the face of sudden tragedy at the very start of this graphic novel and then travels across generations and years of human history. It is both historical fiction and science fiction in such an interesting way. I enjoyed how Vaughan built his main character, someone who unabashedly was chasing her unfinished business. The story takes time to build, it builds character relationships, giving glimpses into backgrounds and flashbacks to develop characters further. This gives readers all the time in the world to start to love these strange characters. It is so different, and the climax of this novel is EXACTLY that, a wild race to the finish that readers will most likely see coming, but still find it immensely enjoyable as well.

This is definitely a “for mature readers” kind of story with lots of graphic sex, violence, and provocative moments. It follows ghosts of a voyeuristic gal and a cryptic gunslinger as they observe the slow-motion apocalypse of a world. It also leans into something more introspective than other Vaughan’s stories. Basically, it shows how obsessed people are with watching tragedy and pleasure from a safe distance.

The story isn’t super plot-heavy, and the pacing is more about vibe than momentum. But it’s readable as hell, and Vaughan knows exactly when to yank the rug out. Henrichon’s hand-painted art is often stunning.

It’s not my favorite Vaughan book, but it’s ambitious and different and I respect that. Is it worth checking out? Dunno, you tell me. If graphic sex and violence don’t disturb you, check this one out.

When I tell you this is a work of art. Brian K Vaughan was already up there as one of my favorites, but this was something else. It had everything I loved, and the moral quandary was perfection. I couldn't recommend enough.

This book was beautifully illustrated. It's a little light on plot. But if you like voyeuristic ghosts snooping on graphic sex during the apocalypse, this is your book.

Vaughan introduces some really solid ideas here - apocalypse stories are certainly timely, and I appreciated the commentary on human nature and voyeurism, in which the reader is cleverly implicated - but ultimately there were too many dropped or neglected threads for this to rate any higher.

And although the nudity, sex, and violence were all necessary, Henrichon's illustrations still manage to feel gratuitous, at least on the first two fronts. I appreciated the (seamless, unremarked-upon!) inclusion of a trans character, but apart from that sole eleventh-hour development, every naked body shared the same silhouette. Perhaps if the nudity hadn't been so homogeneous, it might not have felt so... porn-ified? Exploitative? Boring?

I wasn't offended - if you're the type, Spectators is probably not for you - but I was definitely left wanting more.

Duecento anni dopo esser stata vittima di una strage in un cinema, Val continua a vagare per il mondo come spirito, spiando l'umanità mentre si avvia sempre più rapidamente verso la catastrofe definitiva.
Sesso e violenza sono insieme la causa e la reazione istintiva alla paura collettiva, e Val li osserva, impossibilitata ad agire, come tutti gli altri fantasmi che si muovono insieme a lei, fra cui un misterioso cowboy.
Solitudine, violenza, violenza nata dalla solitudine, impossibilità di agire; non c'è speranza in questa graphic novel.
Detto questo, io la profondità e l'innovazione me le sono perse.
L'unica netta impressione è che Vaughan abbia voluto caricare i due ingredienti principali per scioccare e sconvolgere il lettore - cosa che con me ha funzionato come al solito, annoiandomi a morte.
Ma non ho trovato profondità né nei personaggi, né nell'analisi di quello che sta facendo precipitare il mondo verso la fine; l'unico spunto interessante è come lo sparatore faccia parte di una sorta di movimento incel che vede nelle stragi precedenti un tetto di morti da superare, e come questo gruppo sia responsabile, in un costante crescendo, di attentati sempre più feroci duecento anni dopo. Forse è solo questa inarrestabilità della violenza, nata e nutrita nell'emarginazione di soggetti isolati se non per il web, l'unico elemento di vero interesse.
Ho trovato in compenso interessante come molti recensori della ARC su Netgalley dichiarassero di esser rimasti infastiditi dall'abbondanza di scene di sesso (che sì, sono tante, varie e probabilmente sfondano il limite della pornografia), ma nessuno abbia speso una parola sull'altrettanto esplicita violenza. Trovo affascinante come il sesso disturbi più della violenza, per quanto esplicita.

When Brian Vaughan announced he was going to be doing a free comic about sex and violence, with art from his Pride Of Baghdad collaborator Niko Henrichon (and if you know that graphic novel, you'll know why the newsletter in which they published it was called Exploding Giraffe), it was very much a 'where do I sign?' offer. Since then it's been a long, strange, and yes, frequently explicit ride. More than anything, though, a melancholy one. After the early chapters, only ghosts are in colour, the strange future in which they find themselves rendered in monochrome – a decision which obviously suggests The Wizard Of Oz or A Matter Of Life And Death, even as the story goes to places neither of them would have been able to touch. That greyness aside, the future is...well, lonely, often, and sometimes brutal, but also filled with the sort of incredible yet everyday technology we used to expect from our futures, so between that and the fact it's there at all, not utterly flooded and/or burned, these days I'd call it utopian, despite the way events start trending. And in a sense it's pretty utopian to have top comics creators willingly giving away a whole series for free; part of me suspects it will read considerably better collected than it did trickling out as two or three pages a week. But, much like the people it follows, I'm not brilliant with that level of deferred gratification. Although I'd debate how representative those characters are; at one stage, with another apparent apocalypse looming for the living, one ghost says to another how she enjoys watching the living get horny at times like this: "whenever the general population is unexpectedly confronted with their own mortality, they always return to the same thing". Which...either there are some significant exceptions to that rule, or a lot of people have been having a significantly more entertaining 2020s than me; thus far, this feels like it's been a much better decade for violence than sex. But then they so often are, aren't they? We talk about the world's oldest profession, but organisms that reproduce asexually still prey, so surely violence has been around longer, and all these eons later it remains so much easier to destroy than to create. And somehow so much easier to get our heads around, too: as one ghost says, "I probably had a few thousand orgasms in my life, and I still struggle to remember what a single one of them felt like. But I'll never forget exactly how it felt to get shot to death." Something which then ends up in a feedback loop with our cultural mores, so many places finding sex more taboo than violence, even though one is where almost all of us come from and the other is much more to be avoided. The existence of incel killing sprees has clearly influenced aspects of the plot, but unlike all the chuckleheads happy to blame the nasty interwebs for everything, Spectators knows the roots go back longer; the emotional core of the whole comic, I think, is in a particular scene with a VHS tape which, given Vaughan is about the same age as me, I strongly suspect could be autobiographical. And against those centuries of destructive conditioning, here he does his own small part to push back, with a sometimes strangely heartwarming tale of two ghosts just trying to find a threesome to spy on at the end of the world.
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Rereading almost in one sitting, thanks to Image having finally come back to Netgalley (oh joyous day), though whether this included the new spreads BKV has mentioned, I honestly couldn't say. Perhaps that just means they're very well integrated – though I did notice one page was duplicated in the ARC, even if that did make its grumpy cat even funnier. Certainly the themes and the symmetry come through more clearly this way, and I'm still more impressed at the worldbuilding for how much it stays in the background. A really impressive piece of work, and one I hope endures as it deserves, though the very forces it examines which will militate against its presence in libraries &c already seem stronger than five months ago.

This was an interesting read. I didnt not like it but it did take me a second to get into it. I feel like the back story was kinda pushed in instead of woven. There is a lot of violence/gore at the same time there is sexual content (but no sexual violence) - just FYI for possibly sensitive readers. I like Brain Vaughan and it feels pretty on brand with image comics. It was a fun read, kinda weird but also cool.

What if your entire afterlife started off with a bang? Most people are supposed to move on after such a traumatic ending, but that is not the case for Val. She spends her afterlife doing what she loved to do in life: watching others. In fact, you may say it is an obsession. What new episode may she spectate upon next? And will she always spectate alone?

This one is not for the prude, or those averse to violence.

However, I will say that Brian K. Vaughn has done it again with Spectators. He has sculpted an intriguing tale with interesting characters that keep you hooked til the end of the line. It is worth the read.

#ThxNetGalley #BrianK.Vaughan #Spectators

"Explicitly sexy and shockingly violent" is right! I was warned, and I have read from Brian K Vaughan before, but I must say I was caught a little off-guard when only handful of pages in we see our main character casually watching pornography in a cinema! It is definitely not something you'd want to read on public transport! Having said that, I did thoroughly enjoy this one! It was funny, sexy, violent, and tense - I could not put it down.

Kudos to artist Niko Henrichon, the visuals are absolutely STUNNING. Love the art style and the contrast between the black and white of the living versus the colour of the dead spectators.

3.75 *

This was an unusual read. Definitely not for the faint of heart. If you are sensitive to graphic sex and violence then I would warn you away from this one.

I have been an avid fan of Brian K. Vaughans work for quite some time ( Y: The Last Man being one of my all time favourite graphic novels) but Spectators didn’t quite hit the same as his previous works. The idea was compelling but the execution felt a bit lacking. While introspective at times, dare I say the parts without sex and violence were almost a little...boring. If that isn’t ironic, I don’t know what is.

We are introduced to our main character who is killed in a mass shooting as part of a lethal game called #leaderboard; a vicious game of who can kill the most people at one time, effectively ending with a ‘highscore’ on the #leaderboard. Despite being dead, our protagonist continues to spectate on human life for the foreseeable decades. The majority of the story takes place on a futuristic earth and Nico Henrichon’s art really brought this to life. The colour juxtaposition between the living and the dead was a Spec-tacular (Poor attempt at pun) idea.

Overall, the concept of ‘Spectators’ is very meta, with a break in the fourth wall which was actually very clever. The whole book revolves around the idea that people have a morbid fascination with watching sex and violence and by the end, you the reader, are just as complicit.

** I received a complimentary copy of this book from Image Comics via Netgalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

*Thanks to NetGalley and Image Comics for early copy for review*

Big fan of Y the last man and Saga, but this is not for me. If you like sex and nihilism then maybe this is for you. Gave it an extra star for the art or it would have got 1 star.

The concept and artwork of this was wonderful, but unfortunately it fell flat for me. It seemed quite focused on being sexual, and i think it could have done so much more and been a bit more interesting. But as I say, fantastic artwork

Thank you to NetGalley & Image Comics for an eARC of this graphic novel. All opinions are my own.

DNF @ 25%

I suppose the fault is my own, for not reading the description more closely. I was aware that this was 'erotic' but I have no experience in erotica in the form of graphic novel, and for some reason was not expecting the content to be so *graphic* (jokes on me). For me there was just way too much nudity in the actual images themselves for me to enjoy this, while the storyline to that point was actually pretty engaging and interesting, I just don't think I'm the right fit for this one.

I think a better audience would be those more comfortable with images of a graphic nature, both in the context of sexual imagery & gratuitous violence.

For a story that’s undeniably explicit in nature, SPECTATORS left me with an unexpected sense of quiet sadness. Brian K. Vaughan has this uncanny ability to take what seems like a provocative premise and turn it into something deeply introspective about the ties that bind us as people.

True to form, Vaughan delivers something incredibly readable—I powered through it in just a few sessions. The narrative spans a big, ambitious concept, but it’s executed with a refreshing simplicity. There aren’t tons of dramatic twists or edge-of-your-seat moments, which is kind of surprising given that mass death plays a major role (wild, I know). The world-building feels seamless, and the characters' motivations are clear without ever becoming overly complicated.

The characters are invested, but there’s a sort of resigned, almost zen attitude in how they face the events unfolding around them. That same mood rubbed off on me as a reader. It feels like the heart of the book is about how none of us get to choose the timing of our end. We all wish it’ll happen “the right way,” but in reality… things just happen. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure “sad” is the perfect word for it. Maybe it’s more of a tranquil feeling—but not the glossy, dreamlike peace we often imagine. More like a quiet acceptance, which has its own kind of weight.

And the artwork—wow. Niko Henrichon delivers visuals that perfectly match the somber tone of the story. There’s a raw, sketch-like texture to some of the panels that hits just right. The sheer commitment to doing this entire book in grayscale is mind-blowing, and Henrichon’s attention to detail, especially in the backgrounds, really deserves major praise. It’s all around impressive.

I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing the final print edition of this. It’s a great example of what can be achieved with independent publishing and full creative freedom. While it’s not my personal favorite Vaughan work, I’d still wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone in the mood for a fast-paced, steamy exploration of death and human nature.

I will not be picking up another volume of this one. The story was okay but the graphic sex and nudity was too much.