Skinwalker - Nunzio DeFilippis, Christina Weir, Brian Hurtt, Arthur Dela Cruz
Another book I found while browsing the graphic novels section at the library. It's a creepy suspense/crime story which starts out in Navajo country. Ann Adakai is a Navajo Tribal Police officer, equally suspicious of traditional peacemaking and the FBI agents who show up on her doorstep. Greg Haworth is FBI, and goes to Navajo country during his vacation time to track down an old colleague who left him a vague message.
Eventually there's an alarming discovery of a dead body, the FBI officially gets involved, and a bizarre manhunt ensues, where the criminal's identity is never certain. The story has shades of X-files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and was a fascinatingly creepy plot.
It's told from two points of view, Adakai's and Haworth's, which at first I found a little confusing but eventually came to appreciate. It let us get into their heads and see their motivations and suspicions, and they played off each other quite well. The writing wasn't great, particularly the use of CAPITAL letters to emphasize ANY little inflection in TONE. The illustrations were pretty good, although Dela Cruz's part was apparently doing the shading/rendering, and I felt it was a little too much grey: only very small highlights and the captions were left pure white, which gave the feeling of reading newsprint.
Overall, a good story with a decent execution. I don't know that it lives up to the hype that Greg Rucka gives in the introduction, but it's definitely not your typical comic book.
Fed to jonathan's brain | November 09, 2006
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