By: David Hine (writer), Wayne Nichols (art), Feigian Chong (colors) & Richard Starkings (letters)
The Story: What starts as a prototypical noir-themed, PI story takes a supernatural twist towards the end.
What’s Good: This comic starts out by strongly establishing its noir chops: sexy femme fatale calling in to report her lover’s dead body. Then the stereotype continues by bringing in the main character: Mr. Ryder, the hard-boiled Private Investigator who has an antagonistic relationship with the police despite the fact that his dad was a cop. Within the first ~10 pages, Hine has established that he gets how to lay out a noir story.
Revealing too much would be in appropriate in an advance review, but suffice it to say that this comic does not remain a stereotypical noir story. About 2/3 of the way through there is a supernatural twist that continues to build toward the end such that the reader is left with something pretty unique. If you enjoy supernatural-themed noir, this should be your cup of tea.
The art by Nichols is very soft and is done in a very realistic, painterly style that is often associated with Radical books. It is very nicely done and works quite well. This is art that is servicing the story rather than attempting to show-off with huge splash pages.
What’s Not So Good: The story began to drag somewhat in the middle portions. Sometimes Radical’s double-length format allows for extra story to be placed into a book, but in this case it might have only served to stretch out a portion of the story that didn’t need to be so long. However, the above-mentioned plot twists came to the story’s rescue and the issue ends on a very strong note.
There are also panels where a harder art style might have been more appropriate and it would have been nice to see a little more variety in terms of panel composition and perspective. The art never becomes bad, but it does become a little uniform. When seeing art from an artist who is unknown, it is always nice to see them “go for it” (or be allowed to “go for it” by editorial) in a few panels just to see what kind of artistic chops they have and that is missing here.
Conclusion: A very interesting supernatural end makes one eager to see what will happen in the second issue.
Grade: B-
– Dean Stell
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Conclusion