The first story in this volume, "The Sellouts", is a typical "Powers" murder mystery with a superhero twist, and it works well (though I feel the second season of the TV show, clearly inspired by this arc, made some better use of the central premise of a confused, aging person with the powers of a god), with some properly chilling moments and memorable interactions. The highlight, though, is the longer "Forever" arc, where the book temporarily abandons its detective procedural format to give us a surprising look at the history of the world of "Powers", and some rather mind-blowing insights and revelations regarding the protagonist. My only complaint here is that, as is all too often the case, Oeming's art (while otherwise cool and suited to the book) is just not clear enough to convey plot moments in facial expressions and character reactions when there isn't dialogue to spell it out. This gets close to completely ruining many pivotal moments for me, as I have to backtrack multiple times to try to figure out the gist of the story points, and often only many pages later through revelations in dialogue can belatedly reconstruct and deduce what I was supposed to have surmised from a close-up facial expression in the last chapter.

But even with that, "Forever" remains one of my favourite installments of this series, and has me very excited for volume 8! ( )