1:24 A.M. on March 18th. A couple of people dressed as police break into an art museum and steal thirteen pieces of art worth over half a billion dollars. The paintings have been missing ever since. There’s one guy who knows where they are and he’s ready to cash-in on a reward in Dead Eyes: Empty Frames #1. Writer Gerry Duggan and artist John McCrea bring back the guy with the red “X” eyes for another spin with the aid of colorist Mike Spicer. Duggan’s gritty, shadowy, earthbound visuals cling admirably to Duggan’s dark comedy in an issue that sets-up the new series in style.

Dead Eyes is explaining the whole situation to his accomplice Wheels. It’s the score of a lifetime. A few million dollars at stake. All they have to do is engage in a little bit of danger and they could be set-up quite nicely with cash for quite some time. Before they can get to it, though, Dead Eyes gets a call. Evidently the cash paid for medical debt was a bit too much. Pay for over $10,000 in cash and people are going to have questions. Dead Eyes knows there’s more to it than legal concerns and he’s going to shake-down the people responsible. 

Once again, Duggan is delivering a witty, admirable thug to the page with charm and charisma. Dead Eyes sharply atmospheric first-person narration drives the story straight through the first issue as the basic parameters of the new series are firmly established. It’s impressive how deftly Duggan manages to skew crime drama tropes and twist them into weird new formations with only a few distinct elements of innovation. It’s like watching a party clown twist a couple of balloons and seconds later turn them into a functioning model of a uranium atom. It’s impressive stuff.

A simple as the story is on the surface, a lot of the heavy lifting of bringing the story to life is capably executed by McCrea. That iconic Dead Eye mask manages to remain expressively non-expressive as a very atmospheric Boston makes it to the page with heavy shadows and simple colors that are thoughtfully pulled across the page by Spicer. It’s a deceptively simple sense of panel composition that renders the story without trying to reach too far into weird framing to punch-up the story. There’s a hell of a lot of black coating many of the pages, but it’s all very stylish in its own way. No need to get cute--just coat the page in black and let the color cling for dear life around the edges of everything.

There’s a clean and simple pacing to the story that opens and closes with the central premise of the series. The middle ground helps to establish exactly what kind of a nice thug Dead Eyes really is in cleverly stylish rendering. It’s all very, very sharp. Nice to see Dead Eyes come back once more.

Grade: A