Never miss a post! 
Review: Pat Novak For Hire
Pat Novak For Hire
Written by Steven Grant
Art by Tom Mandrake
Published by Moonstone. $4.95 USD
Pat Novak is kind of a generic old detective character. I can't say I've ever heard of him before, yet somehow I have memories of watching old Boston Blackie movies with my stepdad growing up. Anyway, Moonstone has the license, and despite the lack of pedigree for the character, they picked the perfect writer for his first comics outing for them in Grant.
It's a modern tale--a missing person case that ties into an old, seemingly solved case of Novak's back before people knew to call such stories noir. Novak is old and what we used to call "touched"--maybe the early stages of Alzheimers--and this proves to be a great way for Grant to indulge in chewy old noir narration and yet poke a little fun at it at the same time, as Novak wanders along narrating out loud, in real time, while everyone around him thinks he's a crazy man. He's got a granddaughter that takes care of him and his semiretired detective business, and she's got a secret of her own, one that ronically would have been a little too seedy for most pulp fiction of the '40s but is now not a big deal at all. It's a tight script, and while Mandrake isn't one of my favorites, he's obviously better suited for black-and-white crime stories like these than the superhero books he does much of the time, and he clearly puts his heart into this one. It's a very tasty book, and a bargain at $4.95.
Written by Steven Grant
Art by Tom Mandrake
Published by Moonstone. $4.95 USD
Pat Novak is kind of a generic old detective character. I can't say I've ever heard of him before, yet somehow I have memories of watching old Boston Blackie movies with my stepdad growing up. Anyway, Moonstone has the license, and despite the lack of pedigree for the character, they picked the perfect writer for his first comics outing for them in Grant.
It's a modern tale--a missing person case that ties into an old, seemingly solved case of Novak's back before people knew to call such stories noir. Novak is old and what we used to call "touched"--maybe the early stages of Alzheimers--and this proves to be a great way for Grant to indulge in chewy old noir narration and yet poke a little fun at it at the same time, as Novak wanders along narrating out loud, in real time, while everyone around him thinks he's a crazy man. He's got a granddaughter that takes care of him and his semiretired detective business, and she's got a secret of her own, one that ronically would have been a little too seedy for most pulp fiction of the '40s but is now not a big deal at all. It's a tight script, and while Mandrake isn't one of my favorites, he's obviously better suited for black-and-white crime stories like these than the superhero books he does much of the time, and he clearly puts his heart into this one. It's a very tasty book, and a bargain at $4.95.
Posted by ChristopherAllen at 10:35 PM [Link to this post]
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home