Blue Estate #1 – Review

By: Viktor Kalvachev & Kosta Yanev (story), Andrew Osborne (script), Kalvachev, Toby Cypress, Nathan Fox & Robert Valley (art), Kalvachev (colors, direction & design) & Philo Northrup (contributing editor)

The Story: Detective noir with a few clever twists to keep it fresh.

What’s Good: If you like the noirish detective genre you’re going to like this just fine.  And, if you like detective stories with a few novel, slightly campy twists, your’re going to like this more.  And if you like clever, stylish art you’ll probably like this a lot.

The story has all the things that you need for a good detective/crime story.  There is a sexy redhead who may or may not be the victim, there’s a private detective and there’s an organized crime angle.  What makes it fresh are the interesting little twists that are tossed in, such as a motion picture star who seems a LOT like Stephen Seagal who, after becoming washed up as a film star, ends up being an enforcer for the Russian mob (not to mention some very odd and unclear shower action between the film star & another mob enforcer).  And, the detective isn’t cool or hard-boiled. He’s basically Jonah Hill: fat, bumbling and questionable in competence.  This first issue is all set up, but the creative team as some neat elements to work with as the issue wraps up and you are definitely left wanting to know more.

Pherone (Hardcover) – Review

By: Viktor Kalvachev (design, art & colors), Patrick Baggatta, Jim Sink & Kalvachev (writers) & Philo Northrup (producer)

The Story: An amnesiac seductress/hit-woman learns the truth about her past.

What’s Good: This is one of those properties where outstanding artistic design makes it work.  And, it is also evidence that many artistic tools can work when they are used by a skillful artist who applies a sense of style to their work.

The overall look and style of the book is B&W with splashes of color here and there.  Sometimes the only thing colored in a panel may be a woman’s red lips and the lipstick mark she has left on the wine glass, in other panels, the entire panel may be hit with a smear of yellow to accentuate a mood that Kalvachev wants to convey.  The point is that it is very effective use of color because he is using color to emphasize and to direct your eyes to the things he wants you to look at in a panel.  I wish more sequential art was colored in this fashion because it shows infinite more care and sensibility than merely painting a woman’s dress orange in every panel and then rendering the hell out of that orange dress to approximate body contours.   That is boring…. this kind of coloring is stunning and eye-grabbing.

In terms of the art style itself, I’m pretty sure that Kalvachev is using a decent amount of reference material because everything in his panels looks so real.  “Photo reference” gets a bad name because people think it implies “tracing”, but it can also simply be used to make sure that the stuff in your comic looks real.  And that realism is important when you’re telling a story like Pherone that is supposedly set in a modern reality.  It helps us sink into the story when the cars, guns, animals and people all look real.  I think with realism, you need to be all-the-way-in if you’re going to try it and Kalvachev excels at that with this work.