Bedlam #3

Written by Nick Spencer
Art by Riley Rossmo

Nick Spencer's new series is a strange one, but I feel like it's really hit its stride in this issue.  The series is about Madder Red, a Joker-style homicidal maniac, who has gone through ten years of psychiatric treatment, and has been sent back into the world by the strange doctor who treated him.

When this issue opens, he's confessed to a grisly murder that happened outside his building, but we readers know that he didn't commit this murder, or the others in a string of killings involving elderly people.  The cops like him for these crimes and others, and he's interested in helping them investigate the case.  Most of the issue is taken up with him going over homicide files, believing that he's in some sort of partnership with the Detective in charge of the cases, while she thinks that she's got the killer, and that he's toying with her.

It works very well, as Spencer portrays the guy as being off his rocker in a rather simplistic way, like an idiot savant of serial killers.  As the reader knows what's really going on, without knowing why the real killer is doing these things, the story becomes more and more intriguing, as we hope for mysteries to be solved.

I wasn't sure what to expect out of Bedlam, and I don't like it as much as I do Morning Glories, but at the same time that I'm bored out of my skull with the Joker in Batman, I'm really interested in learning more about Madder Red.