Revolvers #1 // Review
Hampton Wales, is going to hell. (Okay, maybe it’s not hell, but it looks a hell of a lot like it.) He’s a homicide detective in Detroit. A simple investigation on some particularly gruesome murders is going to lead him into a side of the city that he never knew existed in Revolvers #1. Writer John Zuur Platten explore a gritty horror which is plunged onto the page by artist Christian DiBari. Color, sheen, and splatter are added by colorist Simon Gough. Dark crime drama and grizzly supernatural horror mix in the opening issue of a moody series. There doesn’t appear to be much beyond the surface, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.
Detective Wales is a big, scruffy-looking guy who has seen far too much in a city that has come to offer him too little. He’s a shadow of a man looking to defend a city when he can’t keep it together inside his mind. His wife is killed by a guy he was trying to bring-in. Now things have become a strange nightmare of what they had been as Detective Wales is shown the hellish landscape lurking around the corners of a city in decay. Whatever Detective Wales had dealt with in life will be much more complicated in the afterlife. (Oh yeah: he’s dead now. So there’s THAT.)
Platten is working with a type of character who doesn’t seem all that different from quite a few other homicide detectives who have been patrolling the darker corners of popular fiction for over a century. The fact that he’s dead is actually kind of a pleasant novelty. The fact that he’s being led around by the guy he just killed who just killed his wife is...interesting. It might even be enough to hang an entire series on, but it’s not enough to keep the first issue all that interesting. There might be something clever around the corner for Revolver, but the first issue doens’t make it feel all that interesting.
DiBari casts the shadows across the page in the time-honored tradition of contemporary darkness that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the page even...thirty years ago. The horror looks pretty in places and pretty terrifying in others, but it’s not anything that feels distinctly new and fresh. Not that the atmosphere he’s bringing to the page is unappealing. It’s always fun to go back to a kind of a traditional vision of some kind of hell on the comics page. DiBari and Gough make it a fun place to explore visually, but without anything more complicated going on in the story, the series lacks a deeper appeal in its first issue.
It’s always so difficult to judge a series on the first issue...particularly if the first issue in question has a HELL of a lot of backstory to develop. Detective Wales is actually capable of coming across with more of an impressive individual fingerprint. Still, Platten and company need to establish the world in which the action is happening first. And for the first issue, they aren’t doing a great job of making it all seem terribly apppealing.
