From Moonstone Books $3.99
Written by Joe Gentile
Art by Carlos Magno and Andy Bennett
Yes, just a little more Sherlock Holmes. I couldn’t resist this one after having reviewed work from SelfMadeHero and Dynamite Entertainment. A matching of Sherlock Holmes with the ’70s TV series, “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” sounds goofy but Moonstone Books is up for the challenge.
“Cry of Thunder,” a three issue comic, written by Joe Gentile, begins in 1890 out in the Wild West as two desperados peer at something weird just out of our sight. We then cut to present day LA at the modest offices of the Hollywood Dispatch. Kolchak’s purple prose is in full swing as he describes his good luck: Brandy Lexton, a pretty young woman, is interested in him helping solve a 100-year-old unsolved murder. She even provides him with an old journal full of clues.
Once alone with the book, he is chilled to the bone to see his own name scrawled within its writings but where exactly, or why, we do not know. Kolchak proceeds to read the journal which makes up the rest of Issue One. We are in London in 1905 as a new Holmes case takes shape involving the murder of Brandy’s ancestor, Clara Lexton. It turns out she was killed by a gun runner. This leads to Holmes disguised as a sailor, in mortal combat, after he’s gotten a little too close to a syndicate trafficking in American machine guns to the UK.
An opportunity to build on the momentum of the first issue is lost in the next when the assignments of the two artists are muddled. In Issue One, it was the light line style of Carlos Magno that illustrated the Holmes story and the rough style of Andy Bennett that illustrated the Kolchak story. It made perfect sense.
However, in Issue Two, we find the two artists working together through both stories and it’s like a third, painterly, style has emerged. It’s pretty good but the work is not nearly as tight and there are a lot of scenes that appear rushed, especially a less than dramatic fight scene between Holmes and a thug. I can’t fault the artists for experimenting. Overall, I dig what they’re doing but I still prefer what they started to do in the first issue.
I also have a little constructive criticism for the writing. I think that we might get bogged down with details a little too much for what should be a smoother ride given all the great elements at play. I would have preferred more solid connections between Kolchak and Brandy. I think I would have created a few back and forth scenes between the Holmes story and Kolchak and Brandy reading and reacting to it. Those opportunities to interact would have allowed clues to flow more easily and would have made their unlikely romance more plausible.
Issue Three has a lot of things to resolve but it catches a nice push at the end of this current issue. We get a little payoff on the last page as we get a full view of the highly coveted photograph that could explain everything while revealing something out of a nightmare.
