This book actually has a cool concept. Take your average
noir detective and make him a mummy. Not just any mummy, though, one who has to
keep sacrificing pieces of himself in a spell in order to stay alive. Set him
loose on the dark streets, where werewolves and zombies roam, and you have a
pretty decent book.
Dick Mummy even has a great inner monologue. It reads like
poetry, it really does. He’s also got a magic bug that can track people. He has
a quest: to find the Accursed Six, a team of villainous mummies.
All of this has a lot of promise, but sadly the book doesn’t
deliver like it should. The main problem is in the execution. As awesome as the
inner monologue is, it just destroys the story entirely. Dick Mummy finds a
group of werewolves in an alley, along with a young boy who died in the middle
of a transition from human to wolf. Dick Mummy tracks down the werewolves and
finds zombies instead. Etc. So rest assured, there is a story, but you wouldn’t
know it from reading the book.
Every detail of the story that we don’t get from the artwork
is given to us through the filter of Dick Mummy. There is no dialogue. There
really isn’t any character interaction. For the most part, we’re reading Dick
Mummy’s thoughts as he wanders around his city, and when something happens,
we’re still lost in his thoughts. Because of this, we’re distanced from the
action. A story that should be popping off the pages instead seems bland, the
background to a character who is waaaaay too involved with himself. It’s a
shame. Writer Peter W. Caton has an interesting idea. If only he knew how to
tell it and let actions and characters speak for themselves.
Artist Greg Hiatt is amazing, though. The image of that poor
kid, stuck between human and wolf in death, is chilling. The Accursed Six are
decadent and vile. The werewolves are formidable and scary. Dick Mummy himself
looks pretty cool and awful, what with his rotting face under a classic fedora.
It would seem that this book is a spin-off of another
series. It might have been a bit too soon to give him his own title, at least
for now. Maybe he’ll fare better in the future. For now, it’s a serviceable
book. You’ll enjoy the monologue as a piece on its own. However, as part of a story?
It gets in the way too much.
DICK MUMMY #1
Written by Peter W. Caton
Illustrated by Greg Hiatt
Published by Moon Comics
17 pages
$4.50
No comments:
Post a Comment