Written by Ben Lichius and Adam Cogan
Art by Francesco Francavilla.
Covers by Francesco Francavilla and Ben Lichius
The Black Coat is a new four part black and white comic from Speakeasy and will be shipped in March 2006.
The book is set just before the official outbreak of the America Revolutionary War in 1775 and follows the adventures of the eponymous ‘Black Coat’, a spy/adventurer in the style of the Scarlet Pimpernel or Zorro. The opening episode is suitably swashbuckling with the Black Coat swimming out of a submarine to make a sneak attack on a ship near New York harbour. Naturally all is not as it seems and after a narrow escape, the hero returns to New York only to discover that one of his agents has been assassinated. He sets out to investigate the death and is again assailed by an enemy. The pacing of the book is quite good with the necessary background info provided by a combination of unobtrusive narrative text in the initial action sequence and a middle section which provides more plot and exposition before the bookend action-oriented close.
The Black Coat and his adversaries are pretty handy with sword and musket, but the hero appears to have access to slightly advanced technology while his enemies have a decidedly supernatural aspect (one is sometimes invisible and is wrapped in bandages, the other is a patchwork of scars suggesting Frankenstein’s monster). I suspect this is going to be a theme within the story where the new world colonies are portrayed as modern, enlightened and scientific while the old world is portrayed as corrupt and oppressive, governed by occult rather than scientific principles.
The artwork by Francesco Francavilla is impressive, the characters are reasonable stiking and the buildings and artefacts in particular are well rendered, bringing a sense of realism to the setting. Black and white doesn’t mean large areas of empty space and FF uses a broad tonal range that brings both a depth of field and a rich texture to the work. Page and panel composition are also very good with several eye-catching arrangements but no obvious gimmickry. If anything lets the art down it is the character and facial art which has a slightly rushed look at times, particularly towards the end of the book. That said, any artist who reminds one of the likes of Tim Conrad or Bernie Wrightson can’t be doing much wrong.
Overall, the story is reasonably interesting and the art is very good, but by the end of the book I wasn’t entirely grabbed and for some indefinable reason I was not left desperate for more. Perhaps it’s down to the vague sense of deja-vu that pervaded the story. Although the setting is unusual in a comic, the story and character concept are not entirely new and one cannot help but think of pulp heroes like Batman and the Shadow (or indeed Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel) retooled into a historical context. Overall I fear this is more of a shot across the prow than full broadside, though there is still much to admire.
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John Davidson is in his early forties and has worked in IT for the last 20 years. He is married, has two young daughters and lives in Scotland. Ideally he spends his spare time reading and watching movies, but this is curtailed by the calls of child-rearing and part-time study for a B.A. at the Open University. He started collecting comics in the early 80s and has a pretty decent, if mainstream, collection and this leads him to spend far too much time reading and writing nothing in particular on the Millarworld message boards.