Dead Vengeance Review: Pulls You In

John Doe is a few wattages short of a light bulb and it may not be because he’s been pickled in a glass case, making the carnival circuit for a long while. In issue 1 of Bill Morrison’s “Dead Vengeance” the readers get to find out how John Doe became a coming attraction.

Being the inaugural issue of this miniseries, there are a few elements that need to be in place. You should have a good mystery and a well-drawn amnesiac being followed by a sultry, gypsy-looking woman is a good start. Then you should have someone fill in the backstory, not just for John, but the audience as well. Both work effectively and as this 1940’s noir unfolds you find yourself getting pulled in.

What could possibly make this comic go sideways is the time period. After all it’s been covered before. Gangsters, prohibition, how is a 21st-century audience supposed to care about the time right before the U.S. entered World War II and the ending of the great depression? It’s not exactly Watergate or the JFK years, it’s more like a lull in history. But that’s what makes it so attractive, nothing else is going on. Morrison can do whatever he wants and doesn’t have to incorporate momentous events in history. John Doe breaking out of his glass coffin and running into the street is significant enough.

It’s not the “Maltese Falcon”? That iconic 1941 film starring Humphrey Bogart as private-I, Sam Spade who gets caught in a web of lies, murderers and thieves. Still, there are a plethora of questions to answer that will entice you to wait for issue 2 such as how did our John lose a decade of his life? Does he have someone waiting for him and who is the dark-haired woman shadowing him?

What’s more Morrison knows how to weave a story together and hold some level of suspense. During the late 1950’s until the mid-1960’s there was “The Untouchables,” a television show starring Robert Stack that chronicled a fictionalized version of Eliot Ness during the 30’s. It was gritty and for the time period progressive as it showed a distinctively unromantic version of that time. There were also a series of one-shot episodes, but the series shined when they had story arcs that connected actions from the previous episode. “Dead Vengeance” has that feel, where you have a man who ends up worse than dead by gangsters and you want to find out how he’s still walking and talking with a death stench so immense that someone has to light up a cigar just to be around him.

Much like a BBC production there seems to be a finite arc to this miniseries where the story may end without any of the audience’s questions being answered. You also get the sense that things aren’t as cut and dry as his “friend” makes it out to be. But the pace of Morrison’s narrative makes you want more than four issues even if you never quite find out what’s going on. One thing is for sure if you were to put yourself in John Doe’s place you should wonder what the agendas of the people he’s encountered once he’s out of his Rip Van Winkle state.