The Killer: Affairs of the State, out this week from BOOM! Studios (Archaia) brings us into paranoiac spy territory and delves into deep thoughts.
Matz writes of The Killer, who has been caught and then put to work as an on-call assassin. The French government is ‘running him’ while he is concealed in a business setting. Talk about ‘moonlighting’!!
Artist Luc Jacamon turns the lights down low and gives us green night vision renderings of crimes as they happen. Jacamon’s depictions are arresting and well-planned; the bad guys drawn surly and snarly, the good guys with square jaws and level eyebrows. The washed-out office scenes, the interruptions of sex, the banality of a white-collar existence, all are captured with sterile hard lines and excellent character poses. The colouring is underplayed, allowing the dialogue to take centre stage.
And what dialogue there is, and all the world is its stage. Matz gets inside The Killer’s head and allows the internal dialogue to roll, unedited. And ‘roll’ it does, unremitting and damn the torpedoes. The Killer’s thoughts and dreams and drawbacks and doubts and troubled worries. It is a lot lot lot for the reader to take in, and usually not essential to the narrative.
As a result, it’s a big story, made bigger by the inclusion of unnecessary plot sidelines (stepping sideways into the local political figures, mostly), and made somewhat more dense than necessary with the continual outpouring of dialogue. But the guts of drama and tension are here, unscathed and gripping if you can segue around the distractions.
Collects The Killer: Affairs of the State issues #1-6
BOOM! Studios, The Killer: Affairs of the State hardcover, $24.99 for 178 pages. Mature rating: violent and sexual content
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