I Went Looking for a Writer

I thought, Novelist! Novelist's gotta make it work, right, and latched onto Ian Rankin's John Constantine ditty Dark Entries for the new Vertigo Crime imprint. Already there's the benefit of its title, deliberate and mysterious. If you can buy into the loose spirituo-supernatural guff, the story's readably perverse and cute (Constantine's stoicism is reliably cute and so is the premise of Constantine as a reality show contestant). Right from the get-go, Rankin's words: "No news inside, just synapse-numbing junk." Good, I'll take it.

However, I went looking for a writer and found an artist. Manga-inspired at times, Scott McDaniel-y at others, Werther Dell'Edera has to invent new ways of laying out the many interrogation scenes. The central question: how are these reality show contestants connected? Below, the second panel shows Tom hiding his eyes, while the third panel shows Dell'Edera hiding Tom's face; the artist comes off as a sympathetic cameraperson to the reality show's all-consuming eye.

Have another drink, John.