A lot of what I look for in a comic book is the warmth of an object created by hand. The Nightly News doesn't provide that comfort: Hickman uses a cold typeface for all his characters' dialogue. His pages are less drawings than clever graphic design; he eschews panel borders. The characters don't have the same sort of vivid humanity you find in other artists' work, and rarely move across the page. They stand, stiff, and recite their lines.

Another peril: The Nightly News is loaded with information. Footnotes can take up a quarter of a page, and they're the kind of Adbusters aggrofacts that cause most people to go to sleep, such as the infographic about the six largest media companies in the world and all their major subsidiaries.

But I love this book. The plot—a group of radical assassins creates a news event in order to kill members of the media, whom they see as responsible for the majority of society's ills—is as incendiary as Edward Abbey's delightful The Monkey Wrench Gang once was. The cold storytelling style functions almost as another plot point, driving events forward and making the heroes, who are unabashedly butchering innocent human beings for their brand of anticorporate terrorism, not simply monsters, but monstrous ideologues.

Generally, art created by angry young men lacks in many different departments, but Hickman, who begins each chapter with an increasingly less-convincing disclaimer of authorial nonendorsement, is a devilishly smart angry young man; this is a comic book with endnotes and a suggested reading list. The central mystery of the plot is a nice thriller sleight of hand, and the reader should finish the book feeling sorry that things came to a head so soon. This is the best comic book I have read in a very long while.