You know, there is so much right with this book, I'm just going to cut to bullet points.
- Single-page comics that work separately but legitimately hang together as a book-length arc. No, legitimately. I'm serious. Like a season of really good TV. And, like a season of really good TV, there are mini-arcs and single-pagers interspersed between and nested within the larger arcs. Comic books have always done this, but not all comic books have done it this well.
- The mashup of the supernatural and the Roaring Twenties is fun. Al Capone goes up against a guy with an enchanted lead pipe. A chorine in a Marx Brothers show is haunted by her dead husband. The Pied Piper of Hamlin is gigging at the Cotton Club (making him the Pied Piper of Harlem?).
- Great characters:
- Mindy: Smart, decisive flapper rescued from a job selling hotdogs at Coney who packs a mean punch and owns not brass knuckles, but silver ones. For fighting werewolves, of course. Confronts period attitudes toward women with belligerence.
- Ernie: Milquetoasty professor type who looks surprisingly authoritative in a suit of chain mail. We love those characters.
- Roscoe: Cutest lil' gargoyle sidekick to ever hoist a bar glass, tap the bar, and grunt, "Leave the bottle."
- Bad guys ranging from ghosts to gangsters, giant monsters, plus a couple of unique weirdos right out of Dick Tracy.
- Sepia! (Full-color when the comic journeys to an alternate fairytale reality.)
- Brush! (or convincing digital reproduction of brush) And YES I am biased, I like the way analog techniques look, but when you've set your comic in the 1920's, don't you think a slightly old-fashioned look is the only appropriate choice?
- Bobby Timony is good at ink and brush, and according to my friends who do this stuff, brush is hard. Harder than pen.
- Snappy banter:
Peter Timony writes for these soft-boiled gumshoes with economy and grace, wit and timing.
- Nobody dies. Nobody important. A couple bad guys. One good guy, but he's a giant killer bee, and his companions give him a moment of silence, which I think is probably all that that guy might have expected, but what do I know? Maybe invertebrates have complicated rituals for a fallen comrade. And I know I just spoiled things a little there, but he only shows up for like three pages, so when you see him for the first time and have to think, "Oh woe! He's doomed!" you only suffer for a tiny little while.
- The finale is a convincingly motivated gather-up that is neither protracted (Frodo's alive! and he's in Rivendell! and he has to say hello to everyone! and goodbye! and... snooorrre) nor anticlimactic (wait, who died? better show me those gravestones again).
There is just not a single thing about this book that clanks. It is jaunty and light, and yet executed with class and authority. It's a darn good comic. And it's a Cybils Awards finalist in the graphic novel category.
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