Review - Football Crazy: The Theater of Nightmares on the Road to Insanity

The word "fan" is short for fanatic. Sports fans in particular fit that bill quite nicely, especially those fans of football. No, not the NFL. Football as in soccer. Those fans live and die by their teams, groups of individuals that represent local prides better than anything else. It's that fanaticism that can lead to some dangerous behavior, like, say, killing.

Published by CD Comics, Football Crazy: The Theater of Nightmares on the Road to Insanity is written and illustrated by Craig Daley.

Essentially, Football Crazy: The Theater of Nightmares on the Road to Insanity is a story that moves in waves. It's told from the perspective of some pretty big games featuring well-known English Premiere League teams. When a team's star player wins the game, usually that player ends up dead immediately after. What follows is an investigation into the crime, searching clues to learn who's doing it and why.

It's not fair to reveal both the who and the why, but there's a strong sense of team loyalty in the book. It's that loyalty that borders on insanity for some, resulting in the deaths of individuals who did nothing more than their job. Only they did it exceedingly well.

Daley's writing in Football Crazy: The Theater of Nightmares on the Road to Insanity is strong. He's crafted a story that feels like an episode of television crime drama. It read and felt very much like an episode of BBC's Luther, the acclaimed detective drama starring Idris Elba. The crimes are happening against the backdrop of a city gripped in what amounts to playoffs, which helps the story.

The way the story unfolds makes it difficult to predict. It's not one where halfway through you know who did it, why they did it and how. It's only at the end that everything comes together and Daley even uses character expository for the purpose of tying it all up in a neat little package.

The art actually fits the story as well. There are a lot of recycled scenes; for instance, most of the actual scenes regarding a match look very similar, just with different jersey colors. The murders aren't depicted as overtly gory though, which helps to not take away from the story itself.

The tale crafted in Football Crazy: The Theater of Nightmares on the Road to Insanity is a fairly intriguing mystery. It's a good length too, at 68-pages it's more or less a triple sized issue. There's a lot to like in the way the story reads and the ending is set up. Worth checking out.

Football Crazy: The Theater of Nightmares on the Road to Insanity is available now.