It would be reductive to say that Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One, a lumbering behemoth by the previously untested Adam Hines, is deeply in thrall to the mania for overdesign that plagues comic books that would consider themselves ambitious, but it sure is tempting.

The novels of China Miéville are comparable to the iPhone pics which occasionally dot his blog, rejectamentalist manifesto; they are highly designed, made out of the most up-to-date stuff, but they are taken pointing downwards, at the innards of a trash-choked gutter.

To title a novel about a bunch of English expats lounging poolside at an Italian castle after a quote by the founder of Russian populism, Alexander Herzen, concerning “[t]he death of the contemporary forms of social order” could be construed as asking for it.