The Vigil #3 // Review
Saya is waking up. Saya’s leaving a rather disheveled place high above the streets of Mumbai. Lots of people there. They’re all passed out or sleeping. Saya’s in the elevator holding a mask. White with red lines that look like tears of blood. Saya’s a dangerous person--a shapeshifter. Saya’s not just a danger to others, which becomes apparent in The Vigil #3. Writer Ram V works with a clever little mutation of a notion that is rendered for the page by artist Lalit Kumar Sharma and finisher Sid Kotian. Colorist Rain Beredo adds mood and depth to a respectably complex action drama.
It’s early in the morning. The sun has yet to completely rise over Mumbai. Saya sneaks into a woman’s apartment while she’s still sleeping. This is quite a trick considering the location of her apartment--over ten stories above the streets of Mumbai. It’s okay. She’s fine when he gets there. She wakes up a little later on to see the sun rising over the skyline of one of the largest cities on Earth. The haze of the city can be seen in the distance as she sips her coffee. It’s likely to be a long day for everyone.
Ram V is working on an old premise that feels like a fusion of a mutation of a few other characters. At its heart, the idea of a shapeshifter with some sort of dissociative identity disorder is actually pretty cool. It comes from a long line of similar characters who are all really, really fascinating in their own right. Characters like Legion and Crazy Jane and the original incarnation of Moon Knight were all fascinating ideas. It’s always a challenge bringing a character like that to the page in a compelling way. Ram V does his best, but the idea is WAY too big for a single issue, and there’s way too much else going on in The Vigil to give Saya the kind of space needed to really open up to the reader in a compelling narrative form.
There’s a hell of a lot of mystery going on. Ram V isn’t giving the readers a whole lot of time to process everything, but that IS kind of the appeal of the series. Thankfully, Sharma knows how to frame the weird fragments of the story in a way that grabs hold of the reader’s eyes and doesn’t really let go until they pass over the final panel. The moodiness and casually surreal nature of what Sharma is putting to the page is really appealing.
It’s too bad that Ram V’s fragmented narrative is so intentionally shattered. There’s a fine line between telling a compelling mystery and just...throwing a whole bunch of narrative shards at the reader and letting them work it out. There DOES seem to be enough holding everything together to keep a reader’s interest, but Ram V and company are really taking a chance that they might not have the ability to pull it all together before the end of the series.
