By: El Torres (writer), Abe Hernando & Kwaichang Kraneo (art) & Edward Sellner (editor)
The Story: Caribbean and Latin American religious powers are at play in a supernatural murder mystery taking place in Louisiana.
What’s Good: You’ll probably really enjoy this story if you’re into learning about Caribbean and Latin American religions as they play very heavily into this story that centers around an FBI agents who is investigating a warehouse full of dead people who were involved in a kinda pan-religious rite in Louisiana. Of course, the FBI suspects that this is a Jonestown-style mass suicide, but as the story progresses and the agent gathers more information and has a few supernatural experiences himself, it becomes clear that something else is going on.
The comic has all the standard tropes of voodoo stories: reanimated corpses, beheaded chickens, wise old black ladies, reading of fortunes, etc. If you’re into those kinds of stories where a person from the secular world (like this FBI agent) stumbles into an alien and supernatural world, you’ll probably dig this story a lot.
The artists do a nice job of selling the creepy atmosphere of this story and show a really nice understanding of lighting. Everything is colored in a kinda Hellboy-palate: blacks, browns, burnt oranges, reddish-browns. No blue. No green. It works.
What’s Not So Good: Just as I said you may love this if you’re into mystical, religious stories…..if you don’t enjoy those kinds of stories, this may not be much fun for you. I’m really in the latter category: Put this creative team on a straight-up serial killer crime story and I’d enjoy it a lot more. To each their own, I guess…
There are also a few places where the storytelling aspect of the art broke down on some basic things. For example, in an early scene, the FBI agent is riding in the car and talking to his partner on the radio. Only it took me about the whole page to understand who the agent was talking to because the partner’s jagged word balloons don’t have a tail pointing to the radio and the FBI agent is holding a cup of coffee in his hand instead of the police radio. The coffee has nothing to do with the scene. Get rid of the coffee, have him hold the radio in his hand instead and put tails on the jagged word balloons and the storytelling is clear in that scene. There are also a few places where a scene wasn’t as well established as it could have been or it wasn’t clear what panel came next. None of these things ruin the story and the art is overall a positive, but it just shows that sometimes with creator-owned comics you are getting to see guys early in there careers who are still growing as storytellers.
Conclusion: If you love, paranormal/supernatural crime stories, dig in. You’ll love it. If that kinda thing just isn’t your cup of tea, you might not enjoy it as much. However, I will say that it is a blessing that we have a publisher like Image where the same company publishes Invincible (superheroes), Super Dinosaur (kid’s cartoon), Drums (paranormal crime) and Bulletproof Coffin (satire on the comics industry and fandom) and about 20 other comics that I’m overlooking. Bravo!
Grade: C
-Dean Stell
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