One day, drug addict Dee gets an offer that seems too good to be true. A man wants to pay her a small fortune so that she can solve a riddle in the newspaper every day, generate a code from it in combination with an advertisement and radio it from the dovecote on the roof of her apartment building.
It can’t be legal, but Dee is happy to take the cash and spend it on shit and dancers. Until the job takes a fatal turn.
At the start of the two-volume crime series “November” (Translation Stephanie Grimm, writer & reader, 150 p., 29.80 €) different destinies are linked by coincidence and violence. Like that of Emma-Rose, who finds a gun in a puddle after shopping.
The fact that the cops get to her so quickly doesn’t bode well in this case. Which in turn calls Kay from the emergency call center onto the scene, who after a hell of a shift full of Halloween madness and explosions is tracking down her corrupt colleagues…
Award-winning author Matt Fraction (“Hawkeye”, “Iron Man”) doesn’t tell this story as linearly as it first seems. Somewhere between experimental, bold and over-ambitious, the American jumbles up the pieces of his story puzzle.
The connections and clarities click little by little, much of the overall picture is more implicit than explicit. The German edition makes up for that a bit by combining two of the four thin original editions in one volume.
The clear noir drawings by Elsa Charretier (“Star Wars Adventures”, “Love Everlasting”) are reminiscent of comic master Darwyn Cooke and his ingenious panel adaptations of various “Parker” novels by Richard Stark. Not only Cooke fans should enjoy Charretier’s pictures with the colors of Matt Hollingsworth (“Daredevil”).
If only Autor Fraction had followed Stark’s and Parker’s straightforwardness a bit more. The reading of the first volume in the series with the subtitle “The Woman on the Roof” depends on how patient you are and how much you like to put together your complicated crime plot.
Fraction’s narration undeniably has its appeal, and it even gives the comic added value through the impulse to read it twice or three times – but it can also be slightly frustrating. It’s a good thing that thanks to Charretier and Hollingsworth, at least every page is clearly a visual delight.
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