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Ed Brubaker sends up post-millennial stupor and stupidity in his new series, Detour.

Imagine a future that's neither apocalyptic nor idyllic -- the only difference is that the stuff that sucks now will suck a little bit harder. Detour (Alternative Comics). A new series by Ed Brubaker, takes place a few years after the year 2000, in a post-slack dystopia of daily earthquakes in which oxygen has to be pumped into houses. What separates it from the so-realistic-it's-boring strain of adult comics is the eerie feeling that in Detour, the world isn't necessarily worth saving.

Detour, has an unlikely protagonist in Christopher, a bespectacled twerp who shares an apartment with Spool, a nomadic weirdo, and Theo and Allison, who like to walk around naked when they think nobody's home. Chris is constipated, self-righteous, and penny-pinching. He's a whiner with an inheritance who never leaves the apartment -- the kind of guy anyone who's ever had a roommate automatically wants to throttle. The story follows Chris on his zealous march while Spool, Detour's bleak heart, gloomily collects corpses of pigeons that mysteriously drop dead from the city's mini-tremblors.

Brubaker, whose previous books include the stuporous Lowlife series and the exquisite one-off At The Seams, has an uncanny ear for dialogue and a shark skewer for the kind of pretensions likely to endure past the millennium. One of Detour's most vivid scenes shows Chris flashing back to college, when he transformed himself into a wussy activist at the feet of a girl in a No Blood for Oil shirt. "When the whole thing blew up in his face, he awoke to find himself the head of a committee fighting to ban smoking in films."

Detour makes effective use of silhouette, and the heavy blacks evoke the suffocating, oxygen-deprived near-future Brubaker envisions, a world in which Chris spies on his roommates through peepholes in the ceiling. "In the book, it starts to dawn on people that these earthquakes are a sign that the world is ending," says Brubaker. "Given the cast of Detour, maybe that's not such a bad thing."

Images, characters and likenesses © and TM Ed Brubaker