Dark Spaces: Good Deeds #1 // Review
Jean is haunted by nightmares. She’s also haunted by the past. She’s a struggling journalist who hasn’t always been struggling. Now, a managing editor is going to help her out because he owes her a favor. A puff piece on the 450th anniversary of St. Augustine, Florida, might feel like torture to a proud journalist, but there’s more to the town than meets the surface in Dark Spaces: Good Deeds #1. Writer Che Grayson starts a whole new story with artist Kelsey Ramsay and colorist Ronda Pattison. It’s a moody drama that takes to the page with style and poise in its opening chapter.
Cheyenne Rite and her mother have bought a diner in St. Augustine. It’s not a bad place; it just LOOKS like Hell. (A lot like the rest of Florida, actually.) All the old diner needs is some cleaning and a fresh coat of paint. With any luck, that will bring in customers that could help Cheyenne and her mother bring it together. Meanwhile, Jean is rolling into town doing her job for decent pay, even if the job itself isn’t anything that she’s going to really sink her teeth into. She will find out that there’s a lot more going on in St. Augustine than appears at first glance.
Grayson takes her time getting everything lined up. It’s a small town, and there is a strange ensemble of characters. The dialogue is organic and atmospheric. Initial direction is a bit hard to come by. The stresses of a new business and an itinerant journalist stand in for a more compelling sense of narrative momentum. It’s the type of thing that does a good job of serving the overall mood and tone of the setting without totally drawing in the reader. The characters seem interesting enough, but by the end of the first issue of the series, Grayson still hasn’t managed to illustrate what makes this particular small run-down American town any different from any other.
Ramsay and Pattison’s art definitely has the right mood for the series. The swampy feel of Florida squishes across the page under the weight of heavy inks and color saturation. It may not appear quite so distinctly like Florida, but St. Augustine certainly has its own footprints and respiration as it slinks along from one panel to the next. The drama hits the page with long, slow gazes that seem to breathe into their own moods and modes. Ramsay and Pattison have fully committed to the slow stillness of everything in St. Augustine. Even the murder at issue’s end feels like it happened long before the turning of the first page.
It takes a lot of guts to fade in on a moody murder drama over the course of a long, slow, sustained first issue. It’s not exactly an issue that dares the reader to look at it, but it isn’t particularly interested in appealing to any eyes that happen to be scanning through it at any given moment. One has to respect the attitude of a story that is so very, very sure of itself that it doesn’t need to slam itself in the reader’s face just to get people intrigued. With the mood and tone for Good Deeds being what it is, it’ll be fascinating to see where it’s going from here.
