Planning a heist to the Backstreet Boys that sounds as if you’re trying not to trip over every horror movie trope is an interesting way to start a comic book. What’s more it brings about the old adage that if criminals were smart then they wouldn’t be criminals. It isn’t always true. Jack the Ripper was never officially caught. There are hundreds of cold cases around the U.S. that have gone unsolved. Still for the most part at least in the case of Neil Gibson’s “Tabatha†the criminals just aren’t that bright.
In literature and perhaps in life there are three rules to being a good thief. Research your query well, take what you want and get out, and don’t hit the same place twice. For Luke and his crew it would have boded well for them if they had adhered to any of these rules. A job gone wrong leads to good intentions and the next thing you know you look like a prop for a B-movie gone really badly. What goes wrong for these characters makes it a good read. Poor choices make good drama. As the first chapter establishes why this group got together to steal from empty houses in the first place, you realize that poor judgement has led to this point. A point where they’re faced with a crazed man who’s trying to do the impossible. You find yourself shaking your head. After all if these barely-serviceable burglars pooled their resources together, then maybe they wouldn’t be in a fight for their lives.
What’s great about this story is that it’s reminiscent of shows like “The Twilight Zone†and “Alfred Hitchock Presents†where characters are at the crux of desperation. They need money and fast, but not all money is good money especially when you haven’t fully investigated the supposedly empty homes on your mail route. Gibson’s fast paced dialogue alongside Caspar Wijngaard and his art team punctuates each poor decision this team makes. Characters are well drawn both figuratively and literally. You understand their motivations while simultaneously swaying your head at their dumb mistakes.
There’s a series of books called “The Black Company†by Glen Cook. In one of the books there is about to be a battle. The soldiers are warned that if there are any camp followers they care about, then they should tell them to leave before the bloodshed begins. It was a kindness and those followers who did not heed the warning were used as the first line of defense. They were slaughtered in order to slow down the opposing army. In “Tabatha†you can just tell from the beginning that this team of crooks are the camp followers who didn’t leave the battlefield.
As you leave chapters one and two and anticipate just if anyone is going to survive this mess, you get the sense that everything they told you in Sunday school is true. If you steal, the devil is going to get you. Then there’s the hope that constantly gets snatched away.
Complexity is important in any narrative, particularly when you have to care about a group of people within a short span of time. You see it in the unravelling of the villain in this piece. Gustav is someone who lives a life of quiet desperation until he is pushed over the edge. You start to care about him and then realize that he’s a sociopathic monster who’s attempting to live his dream through an inanimate object. Thus you start caring about what happens to all the characters, criminals and monsters alike.
Comics can be a magical world and placing “Tabatha†in a place like Los Angeles somehow makes the crazy plausible. You see more of that at the end of this trade paperback with the variant covers and posters. Essentially, from the beginning to the end of this work, there seems to be an underlying lesson that you should have learned in Kindergarten, don’t touch what doesn’t belong to you. Then there’s that golden rule of don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you. It may cost you more than your life.
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