The story is alright, but unfortunately didn't feel like anything special. The character relationships are well portrayed, but excepting the one between the protagonist and his missing girlfriend, they don't seem very original -- and by the nature of the story, the remaining relationship is only referenced briefly until the final scenes. ( )

I've admired a lot of Brian Wood's work, especially his sense of urban existence. There is, at the same time, a romantic thread through it that can be cloying, a celebration of gritty life that can only really have been conceived of in retrospect, after the cities have been cleaned up, after Taxi Driver and Serpico and so many models for the kind of city Wood excels in portraying are, in fact, the distant past.

In any case, up until the end of Fight for Tomorrow, I found this to be an enjoyable, violent, and enjoyably violent portrayal of semi-organized street fighting, and how violence once introduced as a means to an end ends up seeping into everything around it. The art, by Kent Williams, is strong, figurative yet with a graffiti sensibility, true to the subject milieu. I found myself pausing during the many fights, which take place as a series of still images, like slides ripped randomly from a Muybridge sequence, to map the event through in my head.

Anyhow, Fight for Tomorrow tells the story of a young fighter trying to sort out what came of his girlfriend, with whom he had been exploited since childhood.

* Yeah, spoiler ahead. *

While I appreciate the surprise at the end, that his ex left him for his own good, I don't get why she couldn't have just told him to begin with. The entire book ends up being a very complicated way for her to tell him something she could have quite easily before any of this got underway. I think, generally speaking, a good mystery requires someone to piece something together, not simply to find a single fact.