Key Change offers up 32 packed pages of 21st Century 20-something urban life, comics-style.  There's plenty of attitude, irony, laughs and more.  MacDiarmid knows his way around the comics language. These pages have a density that well embodies the up close and personal manner of urban living.  Readers are able to get right up to speed even as they are plunged in medias res  into obviously long running relationships with plenty of back story; not an easy tricik to pull off.  In addition to great pacing, there's a leveraging of the inherent qualities of the representational aspects of comics language, as when characters' physical attributes are employed as a shorthand for their personalities; and there are plenty of great characrters here.

This is the first of a promised three-issue series.  It might be a minute before the nexts one arrives, but we'll be waiting.