Broken Frontier

Meet John Doe, a mystery man devoted to making sure the unnamed dead do not stay unnamed. What could drive a man to such a crusade?

Most comic book readers are probably most familiar with writer Mark Waid’s superhero work for big name publishers like DC and Marvel but with Potter’s Field he crafts something entirely different; something that is part old-fashioned pulp and part crime noir.

Outside New York City there is a cemetery called Potter’s Field. Named after the biblical reference to the place where foreigners to the city of Jerusalem were buried, New York’s Potter’s Field is the place where the unidentified dead are buried. Homeless people who die on the street, poor infants and murder victims whose deaths have never been solved. It is these latter people who the mysterious John Doe concerns himself with. He has devoted his life to putting names to these dead and dragging their killers into the light. But just who is John Doe really? And why has he set himself on this quixotic crusade?

Like many of Boom! Studio’s titles, sitting down with Potter’s Field actually feels like watching an episode of a TV series. Some of that is probably due to the fact that similar plots have been seen since the earliest days of television and even those were inspired by even earlier pulp traditions. In fact, Doe’s agents – all of whom appear to work for him because they owe him favors – most closely resemble the agents seen in the original Shadow stories or even Doc Savage. Waid deliberately takes these older, pulp tropes, gives them a new, modern paint job and then marries them to the harder-edged, crime stories of today. Unsurprisingly, it is an effect that works. Despite the fact that all this feels familiar (thanks to the pulp and TV framework) Waid still manages to find ways to surprise the reader and twist the story unexpectedly.

The artwork here is provided by Paul Azaceta who seems to be becoming a regular at Boom! Studios after his work on the acclaimed mini-series Talent for them. His style is distinctively angular with bold, thick line work. There is nothing delicate about Azaceta’s work and that is perfect for a story like Potter’s Field where the characters inhabit a world that is far from delicate. Like any good noir story, everything relies on the darkness and the shadows – the places where dark souls dwell and Azaceta understands that and delivers it to the page with a breathtaking clarity.

Potter’s Field is a great melding of many traditions and out of any comic book on the stands today this title is one that screams out to actually be made into a TV series. Dark, brooding, gripping, shocking and surprising, until the day John Doe comes to our living rooms we can sit back, open the covers, and enter his world from wherever we may be.