Death and Then Some
by James Roland
IDW Publishing alternates between high profile commercial comics (The Wrath of Khan adaptation and the Transformers 2 prequel) and smaller, indie books that test the strengths of the medium with offbeat art and quirky stories.
The latest of these is The Veil, a four-issue miniseries written by El Torres (Zombies!: Eclipse of the Undead) and drawn by Gabriel Hernandez (Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always). Both creators live and work in Spain, and make occasional guest appearances for IDW, primarily in miniseries like this one.
The setup is familiar: a woman survives an accident to find she can see the dead. In the opening frames, the heroine Chris Luna walks New York alleys with Beth, a hazy ghost. Luna talks Beth through her death, acting as both therapist and private eye. Like most ghosts in books, television, or movies, Beth is having some issues letting go of the living world. Luna pays the bills by helping her, and the other ghosts she finds, pass on to the nether world, snagging their leftover savings before they dissipate . . . not always successfully.
This would definitely be something you’d find on prime-time CBS if it weren’t for the incredible art and solid storytelling.
While the paneling in this book may be a bit basic, the artwork within is stunning. Hernandez employs rough style choices, with pen strokes clearly visible on character hair and clothing. The world is tinted cold with greens and yellows, so when the artist displays blood with splattered red blotches, it seems to break the natural lines of the scene, sometimes hovering around the images instead of staining them.
As the story progresses, moving from the dark New York streets where Luna lives with her dead, gay roommate to the light, open woods of Maine where she deals with snoopy locals (alive and dead), the story hints at a deeper, overarching mystery. After inheriting her family home — with a dead relative living inside — Luna faces a past that might include murder and a sinister connection with the same train crash that created her powers.
With a private eye protagonist, narration boxes, and Hernandez’s primary cover art, The Veil screams Alfred Hitchcock. And if it lives up to the mysterious hints it drops in the first issue, the graphic novel might be worthy of further mystery auteur comparisons in the future.
Book: T
he Veil
Writer: El Torres
Artist: Gabriel Hernandez
Price: $3.99/issue
Available: IDW Store
