Flawed #1 // Review
Welcome to Setham. It’s a city on the other side of a very dark comics page. There’s a serious human trafficking problem. Horrifying stuff is going on in the darker corners of the city. It’s only natural that a place this dark is going to attract a very dark hero. She gets her debut in Flawed #1. Writer Chuck Brown establishes an iniquity that is deftly brought to page and panel by Italian artist Francesco “Prenzy” Chiappara. The grim brutality of the story hits the page without sensationalism. It’s an admirably level-headed look at horror that perfectly captures the mood and spirit of its lead hero.
Dr. Gem Ezz is a psychiatrist. So much of what the psychiatric field is forced to deal with comes from an inherently flawed society. In a place with the darkly-amplified darkness and corruption of Setham, the flaws in society are that much more powerful. Gem Ezz might be helping her clients solve their problems by day, but to find the source of those problems, she’s going to need to take a different approach that is every bit as brutal as Setham itself. The city is a massive monster. Gem’s going to have to be a bigger one to defeat it.
Brown isn’t afraid to jump straight into the horror. The villain in question is a guy named Skinwalker. Brown gets directly into the mutilations and human trafficking in order to establish the kind of hero that Gem needs to be. The idea of a vigilante who is a psychiatrist by day is a very clever one for a horror-based urban crime action series. Typically there’s always the question of the mental health of someone willing to dive into the darkness and battle evil. Gem IS a psychiatrist. If she’s unstable, she knows full well what that instability can produce. Gem’s dark confidence makes an impressive impact in the center of the panel.
Prenzy gives Gem a kind of unassuming beauty that fuses well with the personality of someone who isn’t in it for flashy visuals. All of the action is delivered to the page with earthbound gravity that pulls the horror across the page without sensationalizing it. Setham reveals a darkness that is smartly gliding along an edge between form and detail. Prenzy gives Setham a dark, shadowy presence that feels pretty far from clean without over-rendering the grittiness to a level that drowns out the kinetics of the bloody action he’s gracefully slamming against the page so many, many times in the course of the first issue.
It’s an impressive opening issue. As a hero, Gem is just really, really cool. She’s somewhere between Batman and the Punisher, but something far darker and badass than either of them had managed. As a whole, Flawed is deliciously over-the-top. It’s urban horror action on a level that feels powerful enough to launch its own franchise. With any luck, the right people see this, and it takes off.
