Art by Diego Greco
Apparently, the new rule is that all Man of Action Studios affiliated comics coming out this week have to start with a car breaking down somewhere in Arizona. I just thought I'd point that out.
This is the beginning of a new series by Joe Kelly, a writer known for both sophisticated stories (the recently completed I Kill Giants being the best possible example of that), and over-the-top humour (Deadpool). Bad Dog is about a bounty hunter who is also a werewolf, and his nasty drunken sidekick. It's a good premise, and is handled very well here. It seems people either react to Lou, the werewolf, with horror, non-chalance, or sexual curiosity, in different degrees. Wendel, the side-kick, tends to only draw reactions of disgust and pity.
This is a big, chunky first issue, clocking in at 40 pages, and Kelly uses the space to show that there is a lot of potential for this series to last a while. We get introduced to a rival bounty hunting outfit, the mystery of why Lou won't revert to human, some on-going discussion of missing children on milk cartons, and what could be a talking severed head that is kept in the refrigerator. All of this is rolled out at a decent pace. The humour in the book reminds me of a lot of Garth Ennis's work - it can get a little nasty, but is also hilarious in places.
The art, by Diego Greco (that has to be a pseudonym, right?), is very nice. His werewolf looks very dog-like (a great test of a comic artist is to see if they can draw dogs - there's a lengthy blog post in there somewhere, if only I had a scanner), and his people are expressive. The colours on the book are gorgeous.
I'm on board with this new title, and I hope it gets a good-sized run.
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