Category: Crime Comics

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XIII volume 2: Where the Indian Walks


By William Vance & Jean Van Hamme, coloured by Petra (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-84918-040-5

One of the most consistently entertaining and popular adventure serials in Europe, XIII was created by Jean Van Hamme (Wayne Shelton, Blake and Mortimer, Lady S.) and illustrator William Vance (Bruce J. Hawker, Marshal Blueberry, Ramiro).

Van Hamme was born in Brussels in 1939 and after academically pursuing business studies moved into journalism and marketing before selling his first graphic tale in 1968. He is one of the most prolific writers in comics.

Immediately clicking with the public, by 1976 he had also branched out into prose novels and screenwriting. His big break was the monumentally successful fantasy series Thorgal for Tintin magazine but he cemented his reputation with mass-market bestsellers Largo Winch and XIII as well as more cerebral fare such as Chninkel and Les maîtres de l’orge. In 2010 Van Hamme was listed as the second-best selling comics author in France, ranked right between the seemingly unassailable Hergé and Uderzo.

Born in 1935 in Anderlecht, William Vance is the bande dessinée nom de plume of William van Cutsem. After military service in 1955-1956 he studied art at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts and promptly became an illustrator of biographic features for Tintin in 1962. His persuasive illustrative style is a classical blend of meticulous realism, scrupulous detail and spectacular yet understated action.

In 1964 he began the maritime serial Howard Flynn (written by Yves Duval) before graduating to more popular genre work with western Ray Ringo and espionage thriller Bruno Brazil (scripted by “Greg”). Further success followed when he replaced Gérald Forton on science fiction classic Bob Morane in Femmes d’Aujourd’hui, (and latterly Pilote and Tintin).

Although working constantly – on serials and stand-alone stories – Vance’s most acclaimed work is his lengthy collaboration with fellow Belgian Van Hamme on this contemporary thriller based on Robert Ludlum’s novel The Bourne Identity…

XIII debuted in 1984, originally running in prestigious Spirou to great acclaim. A triad of albums were rushed out – simultaneously printed in French and Dutch editions – before the first year of serialisation ended.

The series was a monumental hit in Europe but has fared less well in its many attempts to make the translation jump to English, with Catalan Communications, Alias Comics and even Marvel all failing to maximise the potential of the gritty mystery thriller.

The epic conspiracy saga of unrelenting mood, mystery and mayhem began in The Day of the Black Sun when an old man came upon a body shot and near death on a windswept, rocky shore. The human flotsam was still alive despite being shot in the head, and when Abe‘s wife Sally examined the near-corpse she found a key sewn into his clothes and the Roman numerals for thirteen tattooed on his neck. Their remote hideaway offered little in the way of emergency services, but alcoholic, struck-off surgeon Martha was able to save the dying stranger…

As he recuperated a complication became apparent. The patient – a splendid physical specimen clearly no stranger to action or violence – had suffered massive, probably irreversible brain trauma, and although increasingly sound in body had completely lost his mind.

Language skills, muscle memories, even social and reflexive conditioning all remained, but every detail of his life-history was gone…

Abe and Sally named him “Alan” after their own dead son – but the intruder’s lost past explosively intruded when hitmen invaded the beach house with guns blazing. Alan reacted with terrifying skill, lethally retaliating, but too late to save anybody but himself and Martha…

In the aftermath he took a photo of himself and a young woman from one of the killers and, with Martha’s help, traced it to nearby Eastown. Desperate for answers and certain more killers were coming, the human question mark headed off to confront unimaginable danger and hopefully find the answers he craved.

The picture led to a local newspaper, and the attention of crooked cop Lieutenant Hemmings who recognised the amnesiac but said nothing…

The woman in the photo was Kim Rowland, a local widow who had recently gone missing. Alan’s key opened the door of her house. The place had been ransacked but a more thorough search utilising his forgotten talents turned up another key and a note warning someone named “Jake” that “The Mongoose” had found her and she was going to disappear…

He was then ambushed by the cop and newspaper editor Wayne. They called him “Shelton” and demanded the return of a large amount of money…

Alan/Jake/Shelton reasoned the new key fitted a safe-deposit box and bluffed the thugs into taking him to the biggest bank in town. The staff there also knew him as Shelton, but when Hemmings and Wayne examined the briefcase in Shelton’s box a booby trap went off. Instantly acting upon the unexpected distraction, the mystery man expertly escaped and eluded capture, holing up in a shabby hotel room, pondering again what kind of man he used to be…

Preferring motion to inactivity, he prepared to leave and stumbled into a mob of armed killers. In a blur of lethal action he escaped and ran into another group led by a man addressed as Colonel Amos. The chilling executive referred to his captive as “Thirteen” and claimed to have dealt with his predecessors XI and XII on something called the “Black Sun” case…

The Colonel very much wanted to know who Alan was, and offered some shocking titbits in return. The most sensational was film of the recent assassination of the American President which clearly showed the lone gunman to be none other than the aghast Thirteen…

Despite the amnesiac’s heartfelt conviction that he was no assassin, Amos accused him of working for a criminal mastermind. The Colonel wanted the boss but failed to take Alan’s forgotten instinctive abilities into account and was astounded when his prisoner leapt out of a fourth floor window…

The frantic fugitive headed for the only refuge he knew, but by the time he reached Martha’s beachside house trouble had beaten him there. More murderers awaited; led by a mild-seeming man Alan inexplicably knew was The Mongoose. The mastermind expressed surprise and admiration: he thought he’d killed Thirteen months ago…

Following an explosion of hyper-fast violence which left the henchmen dead and Mongoose vanished but vengeful, the mystery man regretfully hopped a freight train west towards the next stage in his quest for truth…

The bewildering journey resumes in Where the Indian Walks (originally collected in Europe as Là où va l’indien in 1984) as the enigma’s search for Kim Rowland brings him to a military base where her dead husband was once stationed. His enquiries provoke an unexpected response and it takes a whole platoon to subdue him after Alan instinctively resists arrest with horrific force. Soon he is being interrogated by General Ben Carrington and his sexily capable aide Lieutenant Jones.

They claim to be from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, know an awful lot about black ops units and – eventually – offer incontrovertibly proof that the memory-challenged prisoner is in fact the deceased Captain Steve Rowland and one of their select number…

Soon after, Carrington has Jones test the returned prodigal’s trained combat abilities and once Steve beats her is made a strange offer…

The military spooks drop him off in his – Rowland’s? – home town of Southberg and clandestinely return him to his rat’s nest of a family just in time for the vultures to begin circling the dying body of paralysed patriarch Matt Rowland. Steve’s wheelchair-bound dad still exerts an uncanny and malign grip over the town, the local farmers and his own grasping, ambitious relatives. The surprise reappearance of another potential heir really sets the cat among the pigeons…

The sheer hostility of the avaricious relatives isn’t his problem, however: before Steve Rowland left town for the army he pretty much made enemies of everybody in it and even the sheriff has happily harboured a grudge all these years…

One who hasn’t is storekeeper Old Joe who shows the amnesiac some home movies that give the obsessed Thirteen the most solid clue yet to his quarry…

So stunned by the possibilities is Alan/Steve that he’s completely unprepared for the brutal murder attempt which follows. Luckily the sheriff is on hand to stop it but when the bruised and battered truth-seeker arrives back at the family mansion, Colonel Amos is waiting, applying more pressure to find the mastermind behind the President’s assassination. This time however it’s Kim he wants to question… as soon as Steve finds her…

The Forgetting Man ignores all distractions; using the scant, amassed film and photo evidence to narrow down the location of a cabin by a lake “where the Indian walks”. It has to be where Kim is hiding…

That single-mindedness almost proves his undoing as the crippled patriarch is murdered and his recently returned son superbly framed for the killing…

With Thirteen again the subject of a furious manhunt, Carrington and Jones suddenly reappear and help him reach the cabin, but when he finally confronts Kim, the anguished amnesic receives the shock of his life… just before the posse bursts in…

To Be Continued…

XIII is one most compelling and convoluted mystery adventures ever conceived, with subsequent instalments constantly taking the questing Thirteen two steps forward, one step back as he encounters a world of pain and peril whilst tracking down the and cutting through an interminable web of past lives he seemingly led…

Fast-paced, clever and immensely inventive, XIII is a series no devotee of mystery and murder will want to miss.
Original edition © Dargaud Benelux (Dargaud-Lombard SA), 1984 by Van Hamme, Vance & Petra. All rights reserved. This edition published 2010 by Cinebook Ltd.

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Resurrectionists volume 1: Near Death Experienced


By Fred Van Lente, Maurizio Rosenzweig & Moreno DiNisio (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-760-7

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Undying Action Adventure… 8/10

Surely everybody loves a cool crime caper yarn and here scripter Fred Van Lente (Action Philosophers, Cowboys & Aliens, X-Men: Noir, Brainboy) has conceived another riotously cracking big-picture concept that will astound fans of films and funnybooks alike.

Illustrated by Italian art émigrés Maurizio Rosenzweig (Laida Odius, Davide Golia, Clown Fatale) and colourist Moreno DiNisio (Dead Body Road), the tale is both frighteningly simple and terrifyingly complex…

Once upon a time 3000 years ago in ancient Egypt an architect named Tao finished a tomb for a dangerously ambitious priest. Unfortunately, the august cleric Herihor wanted to be Pharaoh instead of the Pharaoh and felt that the necessary precautions to ensure his ambitions in this life and the next should necessarily involve killing everyone who worked on the project, including Tao’s pregnant wife Maya…

Meanwhile in the now, former architect and current major thief Jericho Way is stealing relics to order for a mysterious client with big pockets and extremely fixed tastes. Way has no idea why the mystery man only wants Egyptian stuff or that the so-shy client is technically someone he’s known for many centuries…

With brother-thief Mac Jericho is planning to boost some scrolls from a museum, but has become annoyingly distracted by dreams of himself in another time and place. The master planner is blithely unaware that a lot of very strange and dangerous people are somehow cognizant of the changes he’s going through – after all they’ve been there before innumerable times – and are now extremely concerned about the life-decisions he’s going to be making over the next few days…

The first inkling that something is up comes after a particularly intense “dream” as Jericho realises that he can now read the ancient Egyptian scrawl on the scroll he’s just swiped…

Long ago in Herihor’s tomb, Tao, having escaped his pursuers but now hopelessly lost, settles down to die but is soon astounded to see another face. Tomb robbers – also called “Resurrectionists” – have already broken into his impregnable design but now offer him a way out and an opportunity for revenge…

And as Jericho shares his memories of those robbers with Mac, and he notes the recurring resemblances to recent acquaintances, it all becomes clear that he and his new co-crew have been working on that revenge and this robbery for a very long time indeed…

Incorporating a mystic vendetta than spans millennia and an undying love affair, this supremely engaging supernatural saga sees a gang of archetypal thieves locked in an eternal duel of wits and wills against a monster who has co-opted the Afterlife through the most devious and patient methods ever conceived.

However since the ragtag band of rogues can call upon the experiences of every person thy have been, maybe this time they’re going to pull off the Crime of the Ages and finally get vengeance and peace in equal measure…

A delicious melange of reincarnation yarn, conspiracy-thriller and all-action buddy-movie come heist-caper, this is a brilliantly conceived and executed tale with plenty of plot twists you don’t want me to reveal but which will intoxicate and astound all lovers of devious and deranged dark fantasy.
Resurrectionists © 2014, 2015 Fred Van Lente and Maurizio Rosenzweig. All rights reserved.

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Lady Killer volume 1


By Joëlle Jones, Jamie S. Rich & Laura Allred (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-757-7

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Wildly Witty and Nostalgically Nasty… 8/10

1962 was a strangely portentous and memorable year.

We all nearly died in a Cuban mushroom cloud; the United States Supreme Court ruled mandatory prayers in public schools were unconstitutional; The Beatles released their debut single Love Me Do; Vivian Vance became the first person to portray a divorcée on an American TV series and paragon of femininity/First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy took television viewers on a tour of the White House.

Way back then in a cosy era of prim, proper and perfectly contented wives and mothers, Josie Schuller is a bit of an oddball – although you’d never know it to look at her…

In a consumer culture when men wear hats and smoke at work, proper ladies are pliable, obedient “homemakers” and appearance and conformity are paramount but Josie is shamefully keeping a secret from hubby Gene, their two adorable kids and even her nosy live-in mother-in-law. The busybody biddy does have her suspicions though: a strange man is always hanging around, trying to talk to Josie when no one’s looking, and Mother Schuller suspects the worst.

Her nasty mind might be relieved to know that her daughter by marriage is not cheating on her beloved son, merely indulging in a little freelance work on the side. The deceitful little minx is actually an assassin and really, really good at her job…

Unfortunately Josie wants to leave the business, but her increasingly obnoxious handler Peck and his boss Stenholm keep piling on the pressure to take on more and more contracts, with no regard to the happy home-life she wants to preserve. Eventually the devotedly domestic death-dealer decides that her dreams mean nothing to her employers and, after she’s despatched to dispatch another lady trying to quit the lethal game, Josie realises that if she wants to retire she’s going to have to remove the organisation that owns her first…

Devised and illustrated by Joëlle Jones, scripted by Jamie S. Rich and coloured by Laura Allred, with an Introduction from crime-writer Chelsea Cain, this wickedly witty satirical blow for femininity and feminism collects issues #1-5 of Lady Killer from January-May 2015, mischievously mauling the virginal, compliant stereotypes handed down to us from the heydays of Doris Day, Leave it to Beaver and The Lucy Show – by way of Mad Men and Red – and resulting in a fast-paced high-octane period thriller which is a joy to behold.

Bedded in with a wealth of additional material Рroughs, working studies, faux contemporary ads, cover-&-variants gallery and commentary from the creators in a stylish Sketchbook section Рthis is a taut and tantalising thriller, packed with plenty of action and suspense delivered with electric ̩lan and perilous panache, to delight every reader who loves their comedy black and their body-counts high.
Lady Killer™ © 2015 by Joëlle Jones and Jamie S. Rich. All rights reserved.

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Dick Tracy: The Collins Casefiles volume 1


By Max Allan Collins and Rick Fletcher (Checker Books)
ISBN: 978-0-97416-642-1

All in all comics have a pretty good track record on creating household names. We could play the game of picking the most well-known fictional characters on Earth (usually topped by Sherlock Holmes, Mickey Mouse, Superman and Tarzan) and in that list you’ll also find Batman, Popeye, Blondie, Charlie Brown, Tintin, Spider-Man, Garfield, and – not so much now, but once definitely – Dick Tracy…

At the height of the Great Depression cartoonist Chester Gould was looking for strip ideas. The story goes that as a decent guy incensed by the exploits of gangsters like Al Capone – who monopolised the front pages of contemporary newspapers – he settled upon the only way a normal man could fight thugs: Passion and Public Opinion.

Raised in Oklahoma, Gould was a Chicago resident and hated seeing his home town in the grip of such wicked men, with too many honest citizens beguiled by the gangsters’ charisma. He decided to pictorially get it off his chest with a procedural crime thriller that championed the ordinary cops who protected civilisation.

He took his proposal – “Plainclothes Tracy” – to legendary newspaperman and strips Svengali Captain Joseph Patterson, whose golden touch had already blessed such strips as Gasoline Alley, The Gumps, Little Orphan Annie, Winnie Winkle, Smilin’ Jack, Moon Mullins and Terry and the Pirates among others. Casting his gifted eye on the work, Patterson renamed the hero Dick Tracy and revised his love interest into steady girlfriend Tess Truehart.

The series launched on October 4th 1931 through Patterson’s Chicago Tribune Syndicate and quickly grew into a monumental hit, with all the attendant media and merchandising hoopla that follows. Amidst the toys, games, movies, serials, animated features, TV shows et al, the strip soldiered on, influencing generations of creators and entertaining millions of fans. Gould unfailingly wrote and drew the strip for decades until his retirement in 1977.

The legendary lawman was a landmark creation who influenced all American popular fiction, not simply comics. Its signature use of baroque villains, outrageous crimes and fiendish death-traps have pollinated the work of numerous strips (most notably Batman), shows and movies since then, whilst the indomitable Tracy’s studied, measured use – and startlingly accurate predictions – of crime fighting technology and techniques gave the world a taste of cop thrillers, police procedurals and forensic mysteries such as CSI decades before our current fascination took hold.

As with many creators in it for the long haul the revolutionary 1960s were a harsh time for established cartoonists. Along with Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon, Gould’s grizzled gangbuster especially foundered in a social climate of radical change where the popular slogans included “Never trust anybody over 21” and “Smash the Establishment”. The strip’s momentum faltered, perhaps as much from the move towards science fiction (Tracy moved into space and the character Moon Maid was introduced) and improbable, Bond-movie style villains as any perceived “old-fashioned” attitudes. Even the introduction of more minority and women characters and hippie cop Groovy Groove couldn’t stop the rot but the feature soldiered on regardless…

Max Allen Collins is a prolific and best-selling author of both graphic novels (Road to Perdition, CSI, Mike Mist, Ms. Tree) and prose thriller series featuring his crime-creations Nathan Heller, Quarry, Nolan, Mallory and a veritable pantheon of others. When Gould retired from the Tracy strip, the young author (nearly thirty!) won the prestigious role as scripter, promptly taking the series back to its roots for a breathtaking 11-year run, ably assisted by Gould as consultant even as his chief artistic assistant Rick Fletcher was promoted to full illustrator.

This splendidly enthralling monochrome paperback compilation opens with publisher Mark Thompson’s informative Introduction ‘Flatfoot’ and offers a frankly startling ‘Dick Tracy Timeline’ listing the series achievements and innovations from 1931 to 1988 before the captivating Cops-&-Robbers clashes recommence with Collin’s inaugural adventure ‘Angeltop’s Last Stand’ (3rd January – March 12th 1978) which rapidly sidelined all the fantastical science fiction trappings (Tracy’s adopted son Junior had married lunar princess Moon Maid) and returned to grittily ultra-violent suspense as old friend Vitamin Flintheart is targeted for assassination.

With the senior detectives assistants Sam Catchem and Lizz Worthington on the case it is soon clear that the assault is part of a plan to make Tracy suffer. Solid investigation soon turns up two suspects, relatives of old – and expired – enemies Flattop Jones and The Brow and familial revenge is revealed as the motive…

Sadly not all the Police Department’s resources are enough to prevent aggrieved daughter Angeltop Jones and the new Brow from abducting Tracy. Tragically for the vengeful felons, the grizzled crimebuster might be old but he’s still inventive and indomitable and a cataclysmic confrontation leads to a fatal conflagration at the place of Flattop’s demise…

The next tale featured an original Gould villain making a surprise comeback in the ‘Return of Haf-and-Haf’ (March 13th – June 11th) as maniac murderer Tulza Tuzon – whose left profile had been hideously scarred with acid – was released from the asylum, rehabilitated by modern psychology and groundbreaking plastic surgery…

Of course only his face was fixed and the fiend quickly tried to murder ex-fiancée Zelda who had betrayed him to the cops a decade previously. Tracy was on hand to save her life but unable to prevent her from enacting grisly retribution on her attacker, leaving Tuzon frantically in need of fresh cosmetic repair.

Sadly the unscrupulous surgeon who fixed him on the State’s dime wanted a huge amount of clandestine cash to repeat the procedure and the stage was soon set for doom and tragedy on a Shakespearean scale…

This first Collins collection concludes with an epic minor classic that harked back to Tracy’s first published case. ‘Big Boy’s Revenge’ (also known as ‘Big Boy’s Open Contract’ ran from 12th June 1978 to January 2nd 1979) and saw the unexpected return of the thinly disguised Al Capone analogue Tracy had sent to prison at the very start of his career.

Decades later Big Boy, still a member of the crime syndicate known as The Apparatus, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wants to take the cop who brought him down with him.

Ignoring and indeed eventually warring with the other Apparatus chiefs, the dying Don puts an open contract for $1,000,000 on Tracy’s head and lies back to watch the fireworks as a horde of hit-men and -women zero in on the blithely unaware Senior Detective…

The resulting collateral damage costs the hero one of his nearest and dearest, removes most of the strip’s accumulated sci fi trappings and firmly resets the series in the grim and gritty world of contemporary crime. The Good Guys triumph in the end but the cost is shockingly high for a family strip…

Dick Tracy has always been a fantastically readable feature and this potent return to first principles is a terrific way to ease yourself into his stark, no-nonsense, Tough-Love, Hard Justice world.

Comics just don’t get better than this…
© Checker Book Publishing Group 2003, an authorized collection of works © Tribune Media Services, 1978, 1979. All characters and distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks of Tribune Media Services. All rights reserved.

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If You Steal


By Jason (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-854-0

Christmas Gift Recommendation: A comics lover’s dream made real… 9/10

Jason is secretly John Arne Saeterrøy: born in Molde, Norway in 1965 and an overnight international cartoon superstar since 1995 when his first graphic novel Lomma full ay regn (Pocket Full of Rain) won that year’s Sproing Award (Norway’s biggest comics prize). He won another Sproing in 2001 for the series Mjau Mjau and in 2002 turned almost exclusively to producing graphic novels.

A global star among the cartoon cognoscenti, he has won many major awards from all over the planet. Jason’s work always jumps directly into the reader’s brain and heart, utilising the beastly and unnatural to gently pose eternal questions about basic human needs in a soft but relentless quest for answers. That you don’t ever notice the deep stuff because of the clever gags and safe, familiar “funny-animal” characters should indicate just how good a cartoonist he is…

The stylised artwork is delivered in formalised page layouts rendered in a minimalist evolution of Hergé’s Claire Ligne style, solid blacks, thick outlines and settings of seductive simplicity – augmented by a deft and subtle use of flat colour which enhances his hard, moody, suspenseful and utterly engrossing Cinema-inspired world.

The superbly understated art acts in concert with his dead-on, deadpan pastiche repertoire of scenarios which dredge deep from our shared experience of old film noir classics, horror and sci fi B-movies and other visual motifs which transcend time and culture, and the result is narrative dynamite.

This latest hardback compilation collects eleven new short yarns and opens with the eponymous and eerie ‘If You Steal’, wherein cheap thug Paul perpetually risks everything and the one person who keeps him feeling alive in search of quick cash, only to lose it all in the end after which ‘Karma Chameleon’ finds a small desert community dealing with the discovery of a giant, carnivorous and extremely predatory lizard which nobody seems able to see. Good thing masturbation-obsessed boffin Dr. Howard Jones and his long-suffering daughter Julia are in town…

The deliciously wry and whimsically absurdist Samuel Beckett spoof ‘Waiting for Bardot’ then segues neatly into a dashing mystery of masked derring-do as ‘Lorena Velazquez’ eventually tires of waiting for her ideal man to finish off a necessarily interminable and horrific army of villains prior to doling out a maiden’s traditional rewards whilst a fugitive murderer narrates his own paranoia-fuelled downfall after his ‘New Face’ briefly tempts him with love and the never-to-be-achieved promise of peace and safety…

A series of six faux horror comics covers combines to relate the trials of chilling romances in ‘Moondance’ and the classic fear theme extends into a rip-roaring battle against the undead in ‘Night of the Vampire Hunter’ and ‘Polly Wants a Cracker’ follows the other unique career path of artistic legend/assassin-for-hire Frida Kahlo whilst a junkie musician pushes his luck against some very bad guys because ‘The Thrill is Gone’ before ‘Ask Not’ takes a trawl through history from Stonehenge in 2583 BC to Salon de Provence in 1554 AD (courtesy of Nostradamus) to 1960s Cuba, revealing the truth behind the assassination of JFK and Abraham Lincoln and what parts Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby actually played in that millennial plot: a parallel worlds yarn like no other…

The book ends with a stunning, deeply moving graphic examination of dementia which is both chilling and oddly-heart-warming as aging Emma deals with the scary creatures who keep taking away the names of things in ‘Nothing’, proving once more that behind the innocuous-seeming cartoons and contemporary fairy tale trappings Jason’s work is loaded with potent questions…

If You Steal resonates with Jason’s favourite themes and shines with his visual dexterity, and skewed sensibilities. disclosing a decidedly different slant on secrets and obsessions. Primal art supplemented by sparse and spartan “Private Eye” dialogue, enhanced to a macabre degree by solid cartooning and skilled use of silence and moment, all utilised with devastating economy, affords the same quality of cold, bleak yet perfectly harnessed stillness which makes Scandinavian crime dramas such compelling, addictive fare.

These comic tales are strictly for adults yet allow us all to look at the world through wide-open young eyes. They never, however, sugar-coat what’s there to see…
If You Steal is © 2015 Jason. All rights reserved.

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Sacred Heart


By Liz Suburbia (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-841-0

What would have happened when you were a teenager and your parents went away for the weekend?

What if they didn’t come back for four years? And what if the same thing happened to every household in your little town at the same time?

Visually, elements of Charles Burns and Johnny Ryan crackle beside graphic echoes of the Hernandez Brothers in a stunning graphic novel debut which tackles that conundrum with perspicacity, near-feral insight, righteous anger and a great deal of sentiment-free warmth in Sacred Heart.

As much mystery thriller as “Having Come of Age” tale, the mesmerising story opens in little everytown Alexandria which at first glance seems to have gotten a little rowdy of late, but for all the late-night drinking, hot-rodding, incessant partying, lewd behaviour and hijinks is carrying on as best it can.

The older teens are looking after the little kids, school is still attended, the local store still carries provisions and life goes on pretty much as before, even though there hasn’t been a responsible adult in situ for years…

Ben Schiller cares for her rapidly maturing – and consequently increasingly difficult – little sister Empathy; her life-long nerdy punk friend Otto still works part-time at the video store – when he’s not stealing girls’ panties – and he and she still watch weird movies most evenings, trading gossip and stories about who they’re currently seeing…

Elsewhere in their unique community, local garage-band The Crotchmen are the only good thing to see of an evening and Erica‘s baby still hasn’t come.

Jocks still act like meatheads and the pretty girls still chase them whilst standoffish Ben remains involved but apart. She isn’t ignored or reviled these days as she’s devised a method of tattooing which makes her a vital component of the new society…

Recently though, some of the little kids have been acting a little weird: descending into mysticism and fortune telling whilst default storekeeper Jack Brown is claiming that soon he won’t be able to get any more booze or gas for the town’s remaining functional cars, but of course the real downer is how many of the older teens have been found murdered in the last few weeks…

The kids all seem to accept the growing “Dead Kids Club” as a part of life in their little town, but as the summer of excess rolls on towards Fall, things start to change. Firstly Ben and Otto endanger the perfect friendship by bringing sex into the equation, after which an actual adult is seen in town but escapes and Crotchmen’s lead singer joins the casualty list and is replaced with a girl.

Hulking drummer Hugo starts planning how to take his little charges and break out to freedom as the kindergarten seers all predict the end of everything is coming, but worst of all, as colossal storm clouds gather, when Ben discovers who the serial killer is, she can do nothing about it…

Compiled and cunningly rearranged from her webcomic, Liz Suburbia’s Sacred Heart is a potent, uncompromising yet measuredly (proportionately??) hopeful glimpse at the teenagers who terrify all us old farts: dealing with a dangerous world not by crumbling as we assume they will, but by rising to the challenge and accepting the responsibilities we probably wouldn’t.

Gripping, compelling, rewarding and astoundingly readable, this is book to exult in from an author to watch.
Sacred Heart © 2015, Liz Surburbia. This edition © 2015 Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

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High Crimes


By Christopher Sebela & Ibrahim Moustafa (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-472-9

Generally I prefer to go into loads of detail regarding the plot of a book under review but sometimes that’s not possible or even fair. This is definitely one of those occasions…

High Crimes debuted as a 12-issue digital comic by writer Christopher Sebela (Screamland: Death of the Party, Captain Marvel, Escape from New York) and illustrator Ibrahim Moustafa (The Pound: Ghoul’s Night Out, The Flash: Season Zero), produced by Monkeybrain Comics, and its stunning blend of captivating big-sky concept, seedy suspense thriller and chase-movie blockbuster is just too heady an experience to deny fellow action fans.

The scintillating serial took the industry by storm; garnering immense praise and lots of award nominations and now that it’s completed Dark Horse have collected it in its entirety – along with sidebar stories and a wealth of behind-the-scenes and promotional material – into a splendid hardcover chronicle for a wider, more traditionally-minded, book-loving audience.

Once upon a time Suzanne Jensen owned the world. Now she’s an exile eking out a shabby life on its metaphorical roof. When she was a world-famous Olympic snowboarder the medals piled up, but after the authorities discovered that their public paragon of perfection was an unrepentant recreational drug abuser, “Zan” went to extraordinary lengths to escape, abandoning everything she knew and loved to avoid giving back those glittering but pointless symbols of her former greatness.

Drifting across the globe she eventually fetched up in Kathmandu, working as a fly-by-night cut-rate guide, living life one pharmaceutical hit and geological threat at a time. Despite all those promises to herself, however, she never quite made to the top of the granite goddess that dominated the view and attention of everybody around her, native, grifter or spoiled tourist…

She found makework and a fellow damaged soul in the form of aged burn-out Haskell Price, who preys on the families of rich idiots and starry-eyed dreamers risking everything to reach the top of Mount Everest. Haskell is a cold-hearted modern-day graverobber, collecting small personal effects and occasionally recovering the bodies of the so-many climbers who don’t make it.

More accurately he initially rescues just their right hands (for fingerprint identification), strong-arming grieving relatives into handing over cash to retrieve and return the complete cadaver for proper burial. The mountain takes a ferocious toll on the ever-increasing number of thrill-seeking visitors and even if only one bereaved family in a handful fall for the proffered “service”, it’s enough to get by…

Everything changes when he finds a corpse-icle lost near the summit for years. When those particular prints are faxed Stateside it unleashes an avalanche of terror in the form of an ultra-secret, black-ops hit-squad determined to find missing super-agent Sullivan Mars and – more importantly – the still-crucial secrets he absconded with so long ago…

Haskell can’t really help them when they turn up, since Zan has already swiped Mars’s journal and a minute canister of microfilm, but when she sees the collateral carnage the cleaner-squad are prepared to inflict she makes the craziest decision of her life.

As the merciless operatives force Haskell to take them on the arduous, weeks long trek to the summit and Mars’ body, she determines that with no place left to run she’s going to clean up her own mess for once.

Following in the footsteps of the killer elite Zan resolves to rescue Haskell or barring that at least finally get to summit of the overpowering mountain and see the world as it truly is before she dies…

Mirroring her slow and torturous progress with a succession of shocking revelations from Sullivan’s stolen secrets, and clocking up a startling bodycount, the epic odyssey offers a stupendous and breathtakingly vicarious journey of discovery no armchair adrenaline addict could possibly resist, with an emotional pay-off that is a joy and shock to experience.

Preceded by an Introduction from Greg Rucka, the compulsively enthralling yarn is complimented by a Bonus Features section which includes commentary by author Sebela, alternate cover sketches, the 3-page trailer vignette ‘Strange Truths’ from Free Comic Book Day 2014’s ‘Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s Defend Comics’, a “declassified” ‘User’s Guide to High Crimes’, loads of character sketches and all the phenomenal, inspired and imaginative promotional postings and briefs issued to rouse interest in the series.

Epic, arduous and devastatingly addictive, something to treasure for all the right reasons and not just because it’s there…
High Crimes™ © 2013, 2014 Christopher Sebela & Ibrahim Moustafa. All rights reserved.

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Canardo, Private Eye: Blue Angel


By Benoít Sokal (Xpresso Books/Fleetway)
ISBN: 978-1-85386-267-0

Artist, writer and games designer Benoít Sokal (Sanguine, Syberia, Amerzone, Kraa) was born in Brussels in 1954. He studied at the École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc De Bruxells, the prestigious art school where legendary creator Claude Renard (Belles Histoires de l’Oncle Paul, Aux Médianes de Cymbiola, Le Rail, Ivan Casablanca) taught and nurtured many students who would become Belgium’s modern masters of comics.

Sokal joined that select band of professionals in 1978, selling humorous strips and characters to À Suivre and striking gold early. He had been producing short, blackly comedic tales featuring anthropomorphic animals living in a world of contemporary humanity. Amongst the vast cast was a tawdry, unscrupulous, hard-drinking private detective named Inspector Canardo. Although never a true protagonist in those days, the dour duck was always around when events inevitably spiralled out of control…

The occasional series struck a chord with European audiences and soon Canardo was headlining his own series of albums. The first, in 1979, gathered those early shorts into an “Album #0” entitled Premières enquêtes and was followed by 22 more to date: the latest, Le vieux canard et la mer being released in 2013.

Dividing his time between his mallard megastar and more realistic dramas such as police thriller Silence, on Tue! (with François Rivière) and Le Vieil homme qui n’écrivait plus, by the end of the 1990s Sokal had made the sideways jump from comics to videogames creation, leaving artist Pascal Regnauld to handle most of the illustration for his foul-feathered fowl.

The series toys with the internal consistency of storytelling: Canardo and other cast regulars have died several times, timescales are largely irrelevant, early tales have humans, anthropomorphic animals and regular critters cautiously coexisting side by side, science and magic happily co-mingle with the seedily traditional elements of sex, violence, depression and existential isolation and some of the players occasionally refer to themselves inhabiting a comics story.

Although a huge hit on the continent, Canardo struggled to find a place amongst English-speaking audiences. Sporadically released in translation between 1989 and 1991 by Rijperman and NBM for the American continent and through Fleetway’s Xpresso books in the UK, Sokal’s patently adults-only, philosophically nihilistic and bleakly moody homage to film noir came and went largely unnoticed and it’s high time some savvy publisher took another shot…

The third collected volume, La Mort Douce (literally The Suave Death, released in 1981), became Canardo: The Blue Angel – the second British release from Xpresso, the experimental division of publishing monolith Fleetway – when the home of Judge Dredd, Charlie’s War, Johnny Red and Roy of the Rovers sought to catch a pan-Atlantic wave of interest in comics for grown-ups.

Sampling and deliciously channelling the brittle hopelessness of Weimar Germany the tale opens in a bar as singer Lili Niagara – a chanteuse with a life-ending-illness – takes her final job at seedy dive Freddo’s Bar.

Wry drama stoops to the level of Shakespearean tragedy when the duck in the trenchcoat wets his whistle there just as hulking addle-witted bear Bronx wanders in. The loathsome patrons quickly indulge in another bout of savagely teasing and abusing the seemingly oblivious, emotionally unreachable simpleton, but when the far-from-divine Miss Niagara begins singing Lili Marlene (in the original German) the placid victim suddenly turns into a raging terror and kills his chief tormentor.

As previously mentioned, in the earliest escapades the dowdy duck dick is little more than a disinterested spectator; an éminence grise perfectly capable of shaping events and preventing tragedies but always unwilling to get involved unless there’s a direct benefit for him. That starts to change with this cruel investigation into exploitation, greed and past sins paid for at the last…

Whilst Canardo dickers with the owner over a fee for piling in, manic Bronx snatches up the startled singer in one hairy paw before vanishing into the wasteland beyond town. Finally settling upon a month’s free whisky to return the disappeared Diva, the PI slouches off next morning and fruitlessly interviews the aged gypsy crone the bear usually lives with.

His quarry meanwhile has returned to his usual dormant state, and doesn’t notice when his captive sneaks off only to land in real trouble, stumbling into a pack of riverside-dwelling degenerates who want more than just a tune from the ailing performer. They do begin her abuse by making her sing first though, but as the strains of Lili Marlene leak out of their grimy shack, Bronx, once more gripped by a psychotic rage, comes crashing through the wall.

As the singer gratefully thanks her again quiescent rescuer they are approached by sleazy fight-promoter Wes Disposal who wants to make the bear a superstar and before long the big brute is facing off against a true mauler in a makeshift arena.

Sadly no amount of punishment can make Bronx respond and the big lug is being cruelly, savagely taken apart when Canardo steps out of the shadows, advising Lili to sing a certain song. When she grudgingly complies she at last comprehends the cause-and-effect at work as Bronx ends the one-sided bout with horrific efficiency…

The singer is in a bad way. Illness is ravaging her and Lili is prepared to do anything and use anyone to get the “medicine” that eases her agonising symptoms, but the shabby sleuth seems more interested in the pitiful war stories of an old soldier propping up the bar. The bedraggled veteran’s sodden antics are hilarious but a terrified clarity enters his rheumy eyes when he overhears the duck ruminating on why hearing Lili Marlene turns Bronx into a berserker…

When Wes tries to abscond with the bear and all the winnings he meets the fate of all cheating chiselers, and as day breaks Canardo and the concerned-despite-herself Lili are heading deep into a swampy wasteland in search of the blood-stained innocent.

What they find is a troop of old soldiers hidden for decades who share responsibility for the hideous crimes and atrocities which created Bronx and who have been waiting ever since for their deserved doom to return and claim them…

The finale is spectacularly operatic in nature: one of those grim Russian ones where everybody dies…

Stark, wry, bleak, outrageously amusing and almost Brechtian in tone and execution, the saga of Carnardo is a powerful antidote to traditional adventure paladins and a supreme example of the antihero taken to its ultimate extreme. It’s also beguilingly lovely to look upon in a grim, traffic accident, bunny-in-the-headlights manner.

Let’s hope some publisher with a little vision agrees…
La Mort Douce © 1981 Casterman. English Translation and UK edition © 1991 Xpresso Books. All rights reserved.

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Louise Brooks: Detective


By Rick Geary (NBM/Comics/Lit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-952-6

Rick Geary is a unique talent in the comic industry not simply because of his style of drawing but especially because of his method of telling tales. Before settling on his current muse – true crime examinations via his Treasury of Victorian Murder and Treasury of XXth Century Murder series – he worked for decades as an Underground cartoonist and freelance illustrator of strange stories, published in locales as varied as Heavy Metal, Epic Illustrated, Twisted Tales, Bop, National Lampoon, Vanguard, Bizarre Sex, Fear and Laughter, Gates of Eden, RAW and High Times where his unique ability to create sublimely understated stories by stringing together seemingly unconnected streams of narrative to compose a moving, often melancholy and always beguiling whole first made him a national treasure.

Geary has grown into a grand master and unique presence in both comics and true crime literature through those aforementioned forensic reconstructions of some of the most infamous and groundbreaking murder mysteries since policing began, but in his latest release he has marvellously repurposed his eye for historical verity to concoct something new and truly fascinating.

Here his fixation with mercurial silent movie star Louise Brooks coincides with the recorded historical facts of her fall from global fame and subsequent disappearance into the American heartland. A little casual speculation, a few wry ruminations and this cleverly gripping yarn is the result…

In ‘Louise: An Introduction’ Geary précis’ how, for a brief flickering moment in 1927, dancer and actress Louise Brooks became the toast of world cinema, her face known from America to Zanzibar before she inexplicably declined to renew her Paramount Pictures contract, moved to Germany to star in erotic classic Pandora’s Box and began an inexorable decline into obscurity.

She returned to the US in 1930, but parts were hard to find. Returning to club dancing, she married twice and divorced both men by 1940 when, aged 33, she suddenly chucked everything and returned to the family home in Kansas…

Following a triptych of the author’s trademark maps (Central Wichita, the area south east of the city and rural Burden, Kansas in 1941-1942) the cartoon chapter-play begins with ‘Back to Wichita’ as Louise retreats to the fractious, unwelcoming Brooks household and desperately begins hunting for a job. Increasingly however she is drawn into the town’s only topic of conversation: the seemingly impossible “locked-room” murder of wealthy widow Edna Leach, which is like something out of a movie…

Louise strikes up an acquaintance with a mousy shop assistant at the music store, but ‘My Friend Helen’ only has two topics of conversation: her never-seen boyfriend Walden Pond and the grisly demise of Mrs. Leach…

After America enters World War II and her latest business venture fails, Louise sets out upon a new career path as a writer, but undertaking such ‘A Pilgrimage’ is daunting so she seeks out a former New York playwright who has lately taken residence in nearby Burden.

Borrowing her brother’s car she sets off one morning in June 1942, having first made plans to meet Helen and her elusive beau, but encounters ‘Unforeseen Difficulties’ en route and subsequently stumbles upon a deeply personal tragedy inadequately explained by ‘Helen’s Story’…

Finding herself lost in the middle of an actual murder mystery where everything is painfully real and terrifying, the performer soon realises she even has doubts about ‘The Victim’ and reluctantly takes on the unlikely role of ‘Louise Brooks, Detective’…

It’s a part she was born to play but after nearly losing her own life putting together the disparate strands and winkling out the culprit, she says ‘Farewell, Wichita’ and heads back to New York with her dreams reinvigorated and her future again filled with untapped potential…

Combining a superlative talent for laconic prose, incisive observation and meticulously detailed pictorial extrapolation with his fascination with the lethal propensities of humanity, Geary’s forensic eye has scoured police blotters, newspaper archives and history books to compile his irresistibly enthralling documentaries. Happily all that expertise is soundly utilised for his first major fiction feature and once again he has proved bloody murder is always a black and white affair…

A superbly engaging crime conundrum, the only thing that could improve this book is a sequel…
© 2015 Rick Geary.

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Green Manor volume 2: The Inconvenience of Being Dead


By Bodart & Vehlmann, translated by Luke Spear (Cinebook Expresso)
ISBN: 978-1-905460-64-9

The French are generally considered more passionate than us Brits and always eager to dole out grandiose appellations and epithets about creators, but they’re very seldom wrong in their acclamations. Writer Fabien Vehlmann was only born in 1972 yet his prodigious canon of work (from 1998 to the present) has earned him the soubriquet of “the Goscinny of the 21st Century”.

Vehlmann entered the world in Mont-de-Marsan and grew up in Savoie, studying business management before taking a job with a theatre group. In 1996, after entering a writing contest in Spirou, he caught the comics bug ands two years later published – with illustrative collaborator Denis Bodart – a quirky, mordantly dark and sophisticated portmanteau period crime comedy entitled Green Manor.

The blackly funny pastiche of Victoriana’s seamy underside appeared sporadically until 2005 (and was revived in 2011), whilst the author spread his wings with a swathe of other features such as Wondertown (with Benoît Feroumont) and hugely popular children’s thriller Seuls (with artist Bruno Gazzotti) before undertaking a high-profile stint on prestigious all-ages adventure strip Spirou et Fantasio.

Vehlmann continues to craft enticing, engaging tales for kids (Samedi et Dimanche) but is equally at home with more mature fare like Sept psychopathes (with Sean Phillips). For a while he even drew his own strip Bob le Cowboy…

Partner-in-perfidy on Green Manor Denis Bodart studied at the Saint Luc academy in Brussels before taking up teaching. He too soon descended into a life in comics, debuting in 1985 with Saint-Germaine des Morts (scripted by Streng) for publisher Bédéscope.

Three years later he co-created – with writer Yann (Yannick Le Pennetier) – Célestin Speculoos for Circus and Nicotine Goudron for l’Écho des Savanes whilst earning a crust as a jobbing freelance comics artist with work regularly appearing in Spirou and elsewhere.

Following his highly acclaimed turn here he moved on to succeed Jean-Maire Beuriot as artist of Casterman’s prestigious Amours Fragiles.

This double-length compact Cinebook edition compiles the final pair of original volumes – De l’inconvénient d’être mort and Fantaisies meurtrières – which saw Green Manor’s continual catalogue of high society crime, calumny and depravity lead to its inevitable sorry conclusion…

The premise is deliciously simple and wickedly palatable. As seen in the first collection, prominent alienist Dr. Thorne has become obsessed with an inmate known as Thomas Below currently incarcerated in the infamous Bethlehem Psychiatric Hospital.

That poor unfortunate had served as a discreet domestic in a private Gentleman’s Club for his entire life and became violently delusional mere days before retirement. Thorne questions the madman and realises the sorry soul before him believes he is Green Manor incarnate. He has certainly been privy to all that strange place’s secrets, surprises and hushed-up scandals, but can the horrific and bizarre tales he shares possibly be true in whole or in part?

The Inconvenience of Being Dead resumes the unconventional interviews in 1899 as Thorne is dragged from his bed to attend Below once again, but this time the need is most urgent. The old retainer has escaped, broken into a house and taken a family hostage.

Hesitantly the healer makes his approach and engages the affable maniac in conversation and all too readily Below begins telling more tales of rich, powerful and ostensibly honourable men at their most excessive and unbearable…

The macabre menu of skits and sketches begins with ‘Child’s Play’ from March 1871 wherein cruel Lord Virgil observes and is incensed by a passive, gentle servant with the patience of Job instantly resolving to turn the saint into a murdering thing of evil.

Admitting to possessing a foolproof, infallible and much proven method of killing-by-proxy to a roomful of The Great and the Good gathered around, Virgil determines to drive good-natured George into eternally debasing and damning himself by using the process to save himself from torment.

Sadly one man’s torment is another man’s test of faith and the good George is far from predictable…

In 1885 dilettante supernaturalist Joseph Sharp returned from Prague after a fruitless shopping trip for magical spells and objects to find his best friend Mark Abbott languishing under the force of a family curse. However, detailed investigation of ‘The mark of the beast’ and a ghastly family secret in a crypt only proved once again that the unknown has very little force or impact when measured against a mother’s hate, the infinite patience of the tormented and a victim’s fevered imagination…

One night in 1876 Lord Justice Sherman realised he had condemned an innocent man to death, even though not a shred of evidence existed to confirm his opinion. With one night remaining to save his man, the elderly jurist took to the streets of London to find the true culprit and succeeded, utterly unaware that the malefactor involved had already taken vengeance for the judge’s noble act in advance of its completion and Sherman’s ‘Last Wishes’…

In 1897 bombastic, belligerent General Miller gloated at the Club that he had at last come into possession of the fabled Spear of Longinus. The military martinet had no fear of the legends and many deaths laid upon the artefact or ‘The Centurion’s Shadow’, but was beguiled by its repute as a tool to make great men all-conquering.

Nevertheless he was soon one more corpse attributed to the talisman – and not the last – until a pair of the Club’s armchair investigators applied learning and logic, exposing a deadly trap constructed by one of history’s greatest thinkers…but just a little too late…

With the hostage crisis coming to end Below tells his most shocking epigram as ‘Voodoo Night’ finds the gathered gentlemen casually dissecting a juicy murder one night in December 1870 over cigars and brandy.

With irreconcilable facts and impossible assumptions heatedly flying about, soon only absurdity or the supernatural are left as answers to the mystery of the slaying of boorish lout Lord Killian, but in another room the genteel conversation of the closeted Ladies married to the assemblage of tobacco-smoking idiots soon reveals a so-simple truth…

The last legends of the Club are gathered in Murderous Fancies as the increasingly obsessed Thorne receives word that Below has passed away. Briefly thinking himself free at last, it is with mixed feeling that the doctor takes custody of the illegible scrawls of the troubled retainer and wearily, warily begins to decipher them…

‘Endgame’ relates an incident from June 1871 when the Club was driven to distraction by the will of recently paralysed Lord Wyatt. It was in the form of a nonsense riddle and the first to solve it would win all Wyatt’s prodigious wealth…

At the same time the executor secretly consults with dementia expert Dr. Sheffer over the mental state of his master. The aristocrat claims his parlous condition is the result of a murder attempt and this riddle might well be a trap to catch the assailant. Sheffer knows better but soon has every reason to regret his rash conclusions…

‘A Small Crime Serenade’ finds an aged and innocuous gentleman in garrulous mood one night in 1867, sharing with a dutiful Club servant his great gift and passion: a life-long ability to get away with murder. Sadly his boast of capping his career with one final killing is derailed by a most unanticipated event…

In 1827 talk at Green Manor was of only one matter: the recent demise of a radical libertarian poet. Especially fervent was young devotee Dr. Daniel Ballantyne who promptly fell for a cruel prank when the Club grandees purportedly offered him a chance to autopsy the body and look ‘In the Head of William Blake’. They had arranged that what he saw would be like nothing he had ever experienced…

Ballantyne disappeared that night and in the cold light of day an inexorable campaign of terror began as the japesters were slowly driven mad by notes threatening vengeance from the “Tygers of Wrath”…

In lighter vein, ‘Fight to the Finish’ related how two bored big game hunters invented an imaginative game in May 1859. Their aim was to determine who exactly was the absolute best. The prey was to be each other but, although the rules of the competition were strict and fair, as the days progressed it seemed that neither Lord Bennett nor Lord Turner were as able or as gentlemanly as they claimed…

The dead man’s tales ended with a chilling homily from 1872 wherein the cream of society discussed the strange case of Lord Sanders who had blighted his own financial empire and destroyed his greedy heirs by cruelly and carefully tying the purse-strings of their inheritances.

The dominating oligarch had left a vast list of tasks for his four children to fulfil in ‘The Testament’; far too many for any person or persons to complete before getting their undeserving hands on his ill-gotten gains.

Of course even he could not predict how and where greed and frustration could take a desperate man…

And with that final story shared, Below no longer plagued the good doctor’s days, but his influence remained long after he was gone…

Wry, witty, wickedly funny and sublimely entertaining, The Inconvenience of Being Dead offers a supremely damning glimpse at High Society’s low morals which will delight and astound lovers of sly crime fiction, rich black comedy and classy comics confabulations.
Original edition © Dupuis 2005 by Vehlmann & Bodart. All rights reserved. English translation 2008 by Cinebook Ltd.