A very wide ranging anthology comic novel, covering numerous topics, held together by a story about a grandfather telling stories to younguns.

Sometimes when you go out of a night, sometimes you take your time and prepare and carefully choose your garments carefully so they match, work together and everything gels together nicely. Other times, you throw everything together at the last minute and hope they all somehow work together. Sometimes, despite a group of disparate garments, it somehow works on the night.

Iconic seems to have been similarily thrown together, so is it the dynamic and beautiful crowd pleaser that holistically works or is it the green paisley tie with bright pink vest and blue cords ensemble that will only be improved when someone is inevitably sick on it?

The answer is, a bit of both. This is an anthology and they always are a lucky dip of content. In addition it's an indie anthology, so editorial controls of content could be lacking, as not wanting to offend anyone often overrides the editorial sense of whether something is appropriate or indeed good.

That said, this only really seems to manifest itself in the truly mixed bag of themes. The quality of each of the individual stories are generally pretty high, and sometimes excellent. Prometheus and the fire of tommorrow stuck out as a really good example piece and I really enjoyed it.

Thematically, the stories are loosely about icons, although, some of the icons are made up, some of them historical, some of them mythical and some of them I've never even heard of. In short, they are using the loosest defination of the word that is even possible, so that "Iconic" name can be safely ignored. In any case, the mixture seems pretty random to me, pairing up stories about Cuchulainn with Scrooge with Mark Twain. It doesn't really matter, I suppose, but it can be jarring to not have much common ground between the various stories.

The artwork ranges in terms of quality throughout, although, some of the stories have really excellent and professional work. I liked the John Henry story particularly for its artwork and the inbetween Grandpa pages had especially nice artwork. At times, the standard is lower but it's a good testament to the editors that it never really gets poor. It ranges from good to superb all the way through.

With the writing its more or less the same. The John Henry tale was somewhat weaker and harder to follow than, for example, First In Flight or Prometheus And The Fire Of Tommorrow, but never so poor as to be unreadable and counterbalanced by the excellent ones I just mentioned.

So, ultimately a strange and disparate mix of tales, that may lack a strong thematic link but make up for it with a very high standard of writing and art.

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