A pair of homicide detectives hang out in a darkened room. They are having a conversation…but it’s really more like a disagreement that could be construed by some as a panicked argument. They have reason to be tense. There are ten dead bodies that they’re dealing with. One or both of the detectives might be in big trouble in Sam and Twitch Case Files #7. Writer Todd McFarlane and artist Szymon Kudranski continue a dark police procedural that leans heavily on a deceptively sparse plot to deliver a starkly moody journey into the nature of truth .

Sam and Twitch know that they weren’t responsible for the murders, but things ARE confusing enough in the presence of the moment that they just might be considering every possibility. Leads take them to an old farmhouse which features the grizzly appearance of a series of dead bodies that appear to be numbered with their own blood.It’s going to be hell trying to identify all those bodies. They’ve been decapitated and the heads are nowhere to be found. Things have gotten quite grizzly for the two homicide detectives. And they’ve gotten quite a bit more dark for everyone involved.

McFarlane almost has the heart of a really good story. All of the right elements are there, but none of them seem to be going in the right direction to really develop into something truly horrifying or captivating or…interesting. It’s not like it isn’t fun, it’s just not quite where it needs to be for the right complexity. Twitch’s mental state is clearly going through some kind of nightmare obstacle course, but the weirdly paranoid potential of the story never quite materializes in the right way. It could happen if McFarlane was more willing to push things into a wilder realm of dark possibilities. As it is, he seems to be going for something altogether more ambiguous.

Kudranski takes the darkness of the story quite literally. There isn’t a whole lot of sunlight going on in the pages of the issue. It’s all darkness and shadow. It’s something that works well with the darkness of the script, but the visual reality of the story becomes one big shadowy wallpaper whether it’s the two detectives stalking in the dark or the pair going to discover some headless bodies at a farmhouse. There’s a hell of a lot of darkness moving across the page…and it’s accompanied by just a few twinges of real horror.

The moodiness of the series continues to dominate the page. There isn’t a whole lot of actual activity running through all of that mod, though. McFarlane and Kudranski are moving in the right direction to make things work, but they would have to add just a bit more depth for the story to really go somewhere. As it is, the series continued Bea to feel like a sketch of an idea for a more complete series. There just isn’t a whole lot between the covers. What IS there is actually pretty good, though.

Grade: B