Sam and Twitch: The Writer #1-4

Written by Luca Blengino
Art by Luca Erbetta and Fabio Bono

I've never read any Sam and Twitch comics before I too a chance at this mini-series which as recently been collected as a trade.  I wasn't impressed by the characters when they first appeared in Spawn (around the same time that I decided I wasn't impressed by Spawn, and quickly dropped it).  The two runs by Bendis and Andreyko somehow stayed below my radar, and never caught my eye.

I picked up these four issues more or less on a whim, and I enjoyed them the same way I'm usually up for a competent police procedural on television.  There were the same loopy serial killers, bizarre coincidences, and malcontent cops that we have grown so used to on the small screen.  Basically, these two cops are on the trail of a serial killer who writes all over the bodies of his victims.  They are joined by a female graphologist, even though the alpha male cop (Sam) doesn't want her around, for reasons I don't fully understand.  Stuff happens, people die, the case gets solved.  Rinse, repeat.

The book is good though.  I think a lot of that can be attributed to the Italian sensibilities brought to it by its creative team.  There are no word balloons; instead, the typed and punctuated text floats above the characters, linked by faint white lines.  The words sometimes blend into the art, making them hard to read.  As well, there are places where it is easy to tell that the script has been translated from another language - the rhythms are off for English.

The art is very pretty though, and the story is serviceable (even if one of the title characters, Twitch, barely lifts a finger).  I don't know if I would buy this as a regular series, but I did enjoy it as a one-off kind of thing, and I'm thinking about tracking down the earlier two series (although it seems the Andreyko books were never collected).