Review: Point of Impact #1
- Written by Royal Nonesuch on Tuesday, October 09 2012 and posted in Reviews
It's the start of a brand new crime comic by Jay Faerber and Koray Kuranel.
There's always something going on somewhere. That's basically the one rule by which all crime stories live. More to the point, one event can have ripple effects that manifest in multiple places as once. That's the structure taken on by the first issue of Point of Impact, the new series from Jay Faerber and artist Koray Kuranel.
The first thing you notice with Point of Impact #1 is the wonderful chiaroscuro it's rendered in. Kuranel casts deep, dark shadows over all of his settings that provide a palpable sense of foreboding in every panel. The whole world is dark and inky, and that's how Kuranel chooses to depict it. The heavy inking creates a strong contrast that establishes texture, weight and depth as well as a strong sense of place. Reading further into the issue, Kuranel's sense of draftsmanship and panel-to-panel storytelling are also remarkably strong. His "camera" angles are so dynamic that you really feel the height when two characters are looking down onto the street from the roof of a building, you really feel the tension of an argument between two detectives, and you really feel the impact of a fist to the face. It's all rendered so beatifully that it feels immediate, and the stark black-and-white is just gorgeous to look at.
The story concerns a dead woman's body, which comes crashing down onto a car parked on the street (there's some mystery about how she got there, but the cover to the issue may provide a clue). From there, the story looks around at all the connections the deceased had to the living, and how they are affected, in the most immediate sense, by her death. The story introduces the woman's newspaper reporter husband, a possible secret lover, the man breaking into her house to steal a laptop, and even one of the detectives investigating her death, who happened to take a yoga class with her. The dead woman brings all of these disparate characters together and ignites a mystery that is sure to do what crime stories do. There are plenty of twists and turns to come and the mystery is laid out in a very compelling way. Faerber, who knows his way around a crime story (look no further than his other Image series Near Death), and he's put together a tightly-wound procedural here. The promise of Point of Impact lies in the fact that the focus is as much on the people who knew the victim as it is on the dearly departed herself. One death can affect many lives, and forge connections between people that never existed before.
Koray Kuranel's immensely detailed art and pure storytelling chops make Point of Impact #1 a visually stunning first issue, and it comes together with Faerber's taut and effortlessly engaging script to mark what looks to be a great new entry into the crime comics canon.
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About the Author - Royal Nonesuch
As Senior Media Correspondent (which may be a made-up title), Royal Nonesuch tends to spearhead a lot of film and television content on The Outhouse. He's still a very active participant in the comic book section of the site, though. Nonesuch writes reviews of film, television, and comics, and conducts interviews for the site as well.
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