Area 10 – Review

By: Christos N. Gage (writer), Chris Samnee (art) and Clem Robins (letters)

The Story: A serial killer is beheading victims in NYC, and people are getting holes drilled in their heads, giving them powers of precognition.

What’s Good: This was a very fast paced hardcover OGN from Vertigo’s Crime series.  Checking in at 180 digest-sized pages, I chewed through it in ~70 minutes over two sittings.  It was a good, fun and fast read.  The well paced story is that of a “hard-boiled detective trying to catch the serial killer” with a kind of X-Files (or Fringe, for the younger readers) twist.  In a lot of ways, I felt like Gage was kind of paying homage to the serial killer/thriller genre because a lot of the cliches of the genre are in here, but when they play out in a predictable fashion it is fun rather than groan-worthy.  I’d compare it to watching a Tarantino movie where he is playing up Western themes in a fun and slightly cheesy way.  On top of that, there were a couple of plot twists toward the end that I didn’t see coming, yet they weren’t plot twists for the sake of plot twists.  I loathe gratuitous plot twists!

The Samnee art is also a joy.  Being B&W and in digest format, it really reminded me of the art in some of the more realistic newspaper strips like Rex Morgan.  That may sound like a slam on a comic artist, but I don’t mean it that way at all.  It’s well done, clear and tells the story without resorting to needless splash pages.