KILL MORE #1 (OF 10)
Script: Scott Bryan Wilson
Art: Max Alan Fuchs
IDW, $3.99
Kill More takes place in a city in decline, whose only growth industry is homicide.
It's set in the city of Colonia in the near future. This near future is a enough like our own for it not to matter. The technology isn't that far ahead, and what we see of it is out of service anyway.
But it far enough in the future for one particular new industry to rise -- and fall. Colonia was once a space hub -- dubbed "Rocket City" -- where spaceships were built and launched. But that was before a better hub was established on Mars, also called Colonia. (The story differentiates in dialogue between "Old Colonia" and "New Colonia.") So Old Colonia's industry has evaporated, like a Midwestern rust-belt city, whose population is melting away. Think Detroit, only taken to serious extremes.
For example: There's little homelessness, a talking head says on TV, because "everyone can have five houses if they want! There's no one here!" The roving camera shows most businesses boarded up and little activity in the city.
We meet two cops, one of which announces to the other, Det. Aaron Aira of the Crimes Against Persons squad, that he's leaving the city. "I have a family," Det. Gavin Coover says, an officer whose name we may not need to remember. "This place isn't safe any more."
This underscores the many references we get to a declining police force. Later an officer describes her chain of command as "murky," since she hasn't "seen anyone in a month."
This officer -- Det. Mwanawa Parker of the Fugitive Apprehension squad -- seems to informally replace Coover as Aira's partner, a partnership aimed at cutting down the growing lists of unsolved murders and disappearances, lists which may overlap quite a bit. Aira is an obsessive who loses sleep and misses meals trying to solve crimes. We don't know much about Mwanawa yet, except she seems to have a good heart.
So Kill More will be a bit of a police procedural. But there's the other half of the game: the killers. We meet The Giraffe, a serial killer who admits he came to Colonia because it was full of poor people whose fates no one cared about and a shrinking, poorly resourced police force. Perfect for the perfect crimes. The first issue doesn't say so, but the solicitations do: He's not the only serial killer with this idea. We also meet Ethel (runs people over with her car), Lady Facesmasher (obvious M.O.),The Sufferer (death by lethal injection) -- and those are just the ones that are named. We see many more at work or about to be at work. Aira and Parker have their work cut out for them.
There's some suppemental material in the back that fleshes the world out a bit more. One is a short interview with Colonia's mayor, where she doesn't really address anything. She seems more performance artist than politician, like many of our current crop of Congress critters. But that's just an impression from very little information.
I hope all that whetted your appetite, because the review part of this review is that I liked it. We don't really get far enough along in this first issue to do more than suggest where the book is going to go, but it was enough for me. The writing is deft and spare, with dialogue that tells us what we need to know while advancing characterization. The pacing is cinematic, with long "shots" of the declining city and its nasty inhabitants, while the plot advances through "voiceover" dialogue. The art is a bit on the "sketchy" side, in the sense of rough rendering, but that accentuates the shabby decay of the city. Anything slicker would work against the narrative.
I believe we've seen similar stories about collections of serial killers elsewhere; I never read Nailbiter, but that also seemed to feature a town of serial killers. Sandman had its "cereal convention." I imagine Killadelphia and other stories about murdererous hidden societies (vampire or not) hit on similar themes. But there's very little that's new under the sun, and what matters is execution. That was the part that impressed me with Kill More in particular, so I'll be on board for the next issue to see if the quality holds up.
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