Sam and Twitch Case Files #9 // Review
Detective Williams is hot on the trail fo a suspect that he’s been tracking for quite some time. He’s got a gun drawn. The suspect isn’t showi g any signs of concern. He’s going to have to think quickly. He can’t afford to miss if he pulls the trigger, but pulling the trigger is going to have all kinds of other potential conflicts in Sam and Twitch Case Files #9. The writung team of Todd McFarlane and Jordan Barel open a new story for the hardboiled horror detective serial with artist Thomas Nachlik.
Maybe it was the way that it happened. Maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t really ready for it .Whatever it was that was the case, Detective “Twitch” Williams isn’t feeling really good about what he had to do to the suspect in question. Now he’s moving ghostlike through everything that he’s dealing with. There’s.a strained family life and a whole lot of other issues going on in Twitch’s life that are only going to be a bit more complicated. And then his partner Sam gets a call from the morgue that threatens to make everything a whole lot more complicated.
While the story at the heart of the issue isn’t exactly interesting, Barel and McFarlane manage to keep the drama running until the big reveal of the central conflict at the end of the issue. Though the dialogue manages to avoid the cheesier end of cliched cop drama, it doens’t ecxactly provide a whole lot of insight into the nature of the work, life, death and carrying a gun. Theoretically there could be a WHOLE lot more going on thematically in the story as everything progresses, but thinhs would have to start getting a whole lot more deep quite w bit more quickly with the second issue of the series.
Nachlik has a firm grasp of the type of amplification needed to turn a casual cop drama into something much more visually intense. Various bits of framing, shading and color cause it all to come together at interesting angles that seem to be foreshadowing the weirdness that’s going to come as the plot thickens in strange directions. Above it all, there is a depth written into the face and form of Twitch himself as he moves thorugh a great deal of different stresses that move through it all. It will be interesting to see how the pr esence of the supernatural begins to shift through the visual in the next issue.
With the major plot point revealed at the end of the issue...the story DOES seem to be moving in an interesting direction. McFarlane and company seem to be getting into the some potentially interesting territory. It’s possible that the story could get remarkably silly in the ninth issue of the series, but McFarlane and companywould REALLY have to drop the ball in order for that to happen. They’re in the right space in the right place to start exploring some interesting things in dark horror detective fiction.
