Black Cloak #7 // Review
Kiros. The last city in the known world. It’s been five years since the Essex Fire. Blood and fire were everywhere. Now there have been a string of bloody murders. The police are on the case, but there’s a P.I. who has been brought-in to help figure things out for people who aren’t with the police in Black Cloak #7. Writer Kelly Thompson continues an immersive dark fantasy serial with artist Meredith McClaren, who also brings color to the world of Kiros. It’s a fun dive into another world with a lot of clever backgrounds that mix earthbound police procedural with something altogether more fantastic.
There’s a corpse in the heights. Signs of a struggle. A couple of bookshelves have collapsed. The body has been badly mauled. No signs of a murder weapon, but honestly it looks like the victim was torn apart by teeth. Essex is called-in to investigate. (Yeah...that Essex. The one who burned down half the city half a decade ago.) Essex goes to The Heights with a black cloak and and an old friend to investigate. It’s a nice neighborhood. Very posh. It’d be a nice place to live if it weren’t for all the blood on the rug and the caution tape on the front door.
Thompson makes the hardboiled voice over narration really easy for any narrator. She’s developed a really sharp and well thought-out world that doesn’t try to over-render any of the details. The reader needs to look around inside the panels to get an idea of what’s going on and there’s a whole cultural thing going on in the pages that’s enough to induce culture shock in a really pleasant way. All of this would be kind of un-engaging were it not for the fact that the string of murders being investigated is a simple multiple homicide investigation...the likes of which have been haunting the pages of detective fiction for something like a century now.
McClaren’s art is GORGEOUS. There is SUCH a wealth of detail in and around the edges of every page. The crime scene in particular has such a tremendous amount of detail that isn’t garishly thrown at the reader lots of subtlety and nuance in the architectural rendering and a stark contrast between different buildings and neighborhoods within different locations in Kiros. SUCH a cool place to visit on an aesthetic level and that’s not even getting into all of the impressive work that McClaren manages to do with the dramatic rendering of interpersonal end of the story. A casual silent moment of tea between three people feels unspeakably beautiful.
Black Cloak is shaping-up to be one of the more consistently impressive and original series to have come out in the past five years. There is SUCH a sense of invention about it that echoes through a very novel look at a very familiar kind of story. The narrative feels like it falls pretty tightly between Raymond Chandler and J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s a fun and stylish walk between two covers.
Grade: A
