The whole thing starts with a 3-page press conference. The sherif’s badge on the front of the lectern looks official enough. And they’re certainly sounding very official as they talk about what had happened. All by the book and everything worked out. Only thing is: there’s the guy watching it all in the dark. He’s upset. He’s speaking to the guy on the screen. He calls him a liar. He’s got a reason to be upset in Sam and Twitch Case Files #5. The writing team of Todd McFarlane and John Gof continue a story with artist Szymon Kudranski.  

There were drugs involved. Narcotics. There were bullets involved. Homicide. Things were ugly and they weren’t going to get pretty any time soon. Somewhere in a darkened room, a cropse rests in a chair. There’s a not taped to his chest. Scrawled in barely legible handwringing it simply says, “No More Hiding.” There are other corpses elsewhere. A couple of gunshots to a couple of heads. They say “No good deed goes unpunished.” The guy in the darkened room? He’s got that written in red in his wall. Later-on he utters those same words as he goes to a wheat field to dig-up a corpse. 

McFarlane finds a lot of disjointed moments that all seem seem to have some sort of a traumatic weight to them. They all tie together pretty well and an overall story. However, there is no Hawaii here that hasn't been explored pretty extensively before and various places in various ways. It's more than a little tiresome. And it would be absolutely nauseating where it not for the fact that the art does such a good job of delivering the darkness of the story to the page. To his credit, though, Goff and McFarlane DO come up with some very decent dialogue. It’s not like...Raymond Chandler or anything like that, but it’s pretty solid. 

Kudranski has a delicious sense of darkness. And a shadow. And light. It's not easy to define so much in the darkness on the page. Kudranski works well in shadow. And that's absolutely essential given the nature of the story. The diffused light that enters various rooms help bring weight to what's going on. And though there are two nearly identical shots to the head with a splatter out of the back of the cranium, Kudranski  manages to give each one its own distinctive look. 

There's a darker, greedier edge to the Spawn universe that McFarlane, Goff and Kudranski our doing doing a pretty good job of exploring. It's just not terribly interesting beyond the visual. There is a certain amount of poetry in the way things are set up visually. But it's still not terribly deep. It doesn't really engage the deeper notion of what it is that's going on with respect to the crime and the activity in qu homicide remains as things continue to move around in the world of contraband and narcotics and things like that.

Grade: B.