Black’s Myth: The Key to His Heart #1 // Review
Janie “Strummer” Mercado is waking up. It’s been a hell of a nightmare, and it’s about to get worse. For now, though...she’s happy. She’s a werewolf private detective in L.A. living with her girlfriend and her djinn assistant, Ben Si’lat. She’s been sent to spy on a teenage girl. It’s a living, but it’s complicated in Black’s Myth: The Key to His Heart #1. Writer Eric Palicki and artist Wendell Cavalcanti return to their supernatural private detective drama in another series for Ahoy Comics. The heavily-inked visuals feel kind of crude, but the story is well-rendered with a fun ensemble of characters.
It’s a missing girl. A runaway. Janie tracks her down pretty quickly. Not because she’s a werewolf or anything crazy like that. She just knows how to use a “find my phone” app. That’s all. The girl in question is about to head off to college, but there are some things that she hasn’t quite done yet. Problem is: she’s also half-demon. So, there’s that. Janie could just let the girl’s mother know that she’s found her and that she’s safe. She’d only be half lying if she did so. There’s a demon in the girl. Janie wants to keep an eye on her.
Palicki’s pacing and dialogue are remarkably engaging. The contemporary horror fantasy world that the writer’s working with feels natural and organic. All too often, a writer wants to over-render the political angle of magical entities hanging out in the modern world. Palicki is using the trappings of magic and legend to amplify the emotional end of what appears to be a thoughtfully rendered coming-of-age tale mixed with a traditional hardboiled detective serial. Janie and the djinn are fun. The demon girl should be a fun addition.
Cavalcanti’s art feels like a throwback to the 1980s’ black-and-white indie comics. The style features heavy, heavy inking contrasted against blinding white throughout the book. Gray makes an appearance on the page here or there. The drama gets etched into the page as necessary. Fantastic elements occasionally make their way onto the page in interesting ways. All of the heavy inking contrasts against the relatively elegant rendering of a unicorn that makes a brief but poignant appearance. It’s a bit of a crude approach to rendering a story, but it does the job of delivering the story to the page in a way that draws the reader into the world that Palicki is developing.
A werewolf P.I., a half-djinn assistant, and a half-demon intern. Southern California seems more or less a perfect place for this sort of thing. Palicki modulates the rhythm of the contemporary urban fantasy in a way that feels perfectly well-suited to another pleasant fusion. Palicki and company are working with so many tropes that are so harrowingly close to cliche, but they have managed to more or less successfully avoid them all so far.
