Broken Frontier

Joe Coogan wakes up in a strange bed and in a lot of pain, which isn’t so unusual, but the pain he feels isn’t a hangover or simple bumps and bruises—when he forces his muscles to unlock from the stiffness of rigor mortis, Joe Coogan realizes he’s very much dead, but also quite definitely (painfully) awake.  So he shoves his guts back through an ever-softening rend in his stomach, wraps himself to stay together, and sets out, stinking literally like death warmed over, to find out how he came to be this way.

Horror-comics maestro Steve Niles teams up with that other horror-comics maestro, Bernie Wrightson, and we get this: Dead, She Said.  Who’s the “she” in the title?  No idea yet, as this opening chapter is just the barest of introductions.  Niles isn’t the densest of storytellers, and this series is no departure from his usual; the opening sequence with Coogan waking up and figuring out the basic score is phenomenal, and what follows is just about the last kind of set-up scene you’d ever expect to go along with the premise, but there isn’t much else besides.  The story here is sparse and colored with the PI noir ham-fistedness that’s apt and the bits and pieces that are shown prove surprising, completely unpredictable.  In a nutshell, it’s a too-short first, but a highly freaking enticing one.

On the outside this wouldn’t’ seem the right story to give an artist so good at drawing the grotesque as Wrightson, but in fact, the story is a glorious spotlight for his modern-most work.  Wrightson pencils and inks himself here, and I’ve never seen him so tight.  The lines are incredibly fine, sharp and smooth and the detail gorgeously balanced between heavy and light.  His figures and expressions are wonderfully banal in an almost eerie way, when sidled up next to the subject matter.  The layouts are classic and strong and the gore, when it’s present, is superb, as expected.  Wrightson also manages to pump out a properly shadow-laden noir  atmosphere without overpowering the cleanness of his lines (which for him is a novelty) and the earth-and-stone tone coloring by Grant Goleash makes the end result pitch-perfect visuals.

Dead, She Said is an outstanding first issue in all but sheer concentration of plot, which is a minor flaw when the story itself and the art, in every other way, stands out and takes hold.  Readers will likely be musing over the characters, events, and art of this issue for days after reading it, even if it’s read amongst a slew of other weekly books.  Like I said: this one stands out, not just as a book, but as a Niles and/or a Wrightson book; it’s a really solid and marvelous new story, even (dare I say it?) horrific.