Black’s Myth: The Key to His Heart #2 // Review
Strummer walks into the living room that morning, sipping coffee and asking why it looked like a bomb went off. She’s overreacting. There are just a couple of dozen ancient-looking pages splayed on the floor. He’s having a cup of coffee, trying to get the pages back in order. The pages in question were in a package she received the previous day. Now would be a good time to discuss opening her mail without her permission, but this is only tangential to a much bigger problem in Black’s Myth: The Key to His Heart #2. Writer Eric Palicki continues his contemporary supernatural mystery with artist Wendell Cavalcanti.
He might have been up all night looking over ancient texts. He’s sorry for having opened it without her permission, but he has a question: what does she know about King Solomon. She knows that he’s what most people do: he’s the “cut-the-baby-in-half-guy from the bible.” He’s more or less an immortal Djinn, so he’s been around a little bit longer than her. Having been around quite a bit longer than she has, he’s going to educate her about matters. Evidently, the pages in question are from him. He conscripted a workforce of demons and genies and commanded them with a spellbook. The pages strewn all over the living room? They’re from that book of spells.
Palicki fills a fairly dense occult mystery with funny dialogue and interesting characterization. There is great depth to nearly every character on the page. It all comes together nicely. However, not all of it interfaces with a comic book format all that well. A dialogue drama doesn't play to the page with a great degree of articulation. And then the overwhelmingly monstrous horror hits the page, and it all kind of makes some kind of sense. The story really IS quite fascinating. It's just really difficult to draw the layers of drama onto the page when so much of it is woven into the dialogue.
The author isn’t doing any favors for the artist. Cavalcanti is handed quite a hefty challenge in keeping Talking Heads interesting. However, when the horror hits, there is some serious drama going on there that is very, very potent. And it gets pretty gruesome. That's when the comic book format really kicks into high gear and delivers the action to the page in a way that it wouldn't really be able to play out on stage or screen. There's a cleanly kinetic nature to sequential art that really serves the format of the supernatural quite well in this particular world. It's just too bad that Cavalcanti can’t do something more dynamic with the talking head drama.
There are ways to bring conversation to the page that serve even the black-and-white format of Black’s Myth. Dave Sim did remarkable things with intrigue and drama on the comic book page back in the 1980s. It’s all a matter of fusing the sequential format of the drama to the mystery in a way that’s both visually appealing and closely tied to a series of pictures. Cavalcanti hasn’t quite worked it out yet, but there’s some very powerful drama making it to the page, so it’s well worth a look.
