Mysterious Ways 1

This is an odd comic, in that it seems to set up one kind of storyline and genre, then on the last page tell us that it isn’t that kind of thing at all. We see a woman tortured and murdered, then meet a tough drunk guy who has been in prison for murder, and see his face on TV as the chief suspect. He escapes from police in implausible style, then heads home for the night where they unaccountably don’t pick him up, although they know very well who he is. This is all okay for a crime comic, if utterly cliched of course, but then the last page is a picture of the FBI agent investigating the murder with a big demon behind him, so obviously there is a supernatural story here. I’m all for subverting the reader’s expectations, but doing it just by basically stating that there is magic going on is a desperately weak and clumsy way of doing that. They might as well just have had bold type saying “Sorry this is just a standard crime story so far – please keep reading, THERE IS MAGIC IN THIS STORY TOO.”

There is little help from the actual script: Rubin has a total tin ear for dialogue and a terrible sense of timing and rhythm, meaning it’s all horribly stiff and gives no personality to the murder suspect, let alone the empty supporting characters. The whole thing is slow, not helped at all by some very poorly paced layouts. I think what we have here is a dreary penciller, whose drawing is not always good enough, but a rather good inker who gives it an attractive and sometimes even atmospheric look.

There is a stupid text page in back of this challenging readers to guess the plot twists ahead. As well as this being a tedious game, it can’t be done because the story sets up one thing and then tells us the genre is something else, without any genuine clues as to what the general direction could be. It’s all very easy to be smug about the unpredictability of a story when you give no useful information in the first issue. I imagine they must have some good ideas and plot turns ahead simply because the scripting, layout and drawing of this first issue would surely not have tempted any professional company to publish this third-rate mess otherwise, but I certainly won’t hang around to find out.