Broken Frontier

What if Edgar Allan Poe was more than just a writer of the mysterious and macabre… what if it pursued him?

BOOM! Studios jumps in with other writers of both comics and regular books to take a real, historical figure, and wrap a new fictional story around them.  In this case there certainly could be little better subject than Edgar Allan Poe, whose real life was filled with tragedy and failure as much as his prose and poetry was filled with the odd, unearthly, and dark.

Edgar Allan Poe has been through a series of sanitariums having been unbalanced by the recent loss of his wife.  As he makes himself unwelcome at each institution, his brother comes to collect him from the most recent facility to throw him out.  William Poe, however, is a police constable, and one involved in a series of unexplained murders.  As he is forced to take Edgar with him to the latest crime scene he is stunned to discover his brother has some hidden talents… both earthly and unearthly.  These crimes have a touch of magic to them but can the tormented writer and his disbelieving brother find the killers and put a stop to something that may go far beyond this plane of existence?

While Arthur Conan Doyle is usually given the title “father of the modern detective story” Edgar Allan Poe is usually acknowledged as the “grandfather of the modern detective story” with his creation of the French investigator C. Auguste Dupin.  Here, Mitchell cannily extracts the knowledge from Poe’s writing and hands it to Poe directly.  While it actually lends an air of believability to the scenario the actual scene comes off a little clumsy and rushed.  The adding of the macabre elements as well as Poe’s power of post-cognition also adds an interesting flavor to the story as a whole – making it an interesting mix of ratiocination, superstition and the supernatural.  Taken as a whole there is a compelling edge present but the comic is still missing that little spark that pushes it over the top into captivating.

The art, provided by Dean Kotz is also quite good overall but there are some consistency problems.  Kotz’s depiction of Edgar Poe changes occasionally between pages and panels and looks distinctly off-model in several places.  Aside from that, Kotz proves himself an excellent depicter of the gothic and haunting.  He gives his ghosts a chilling, truly otherworldly appearance – as if of something connected to our world but no longer a part of it.  There are also very nice sequences capturing the look of the trappings of the time period and place – everything from conveyances to clothing.

Poe #1 is an interesting and entertaining idea.  Mitchell takes just enough from Poe’s real life to give the comic some grounding and bring out the humanity of the character and the idea of an author who has become so associated with the eerie and horrific coming face-to-face with such gives the tale a little quirk.  Still, there is a little bit of awkwardness in the script here and there which throws the balance off and some hints of modernism creep in which rips the reader out of the 1847 setting.  If you have an interest in the macabre, however, Poe may well be worth a look for you.