The Private Eye #7 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Marcos Martin (art), Muntsa Vicente (colors)

The Story: No one deserves to go down this way—not even a sex doll.

The Review: Brace yourself—personal story coming through. A few months ago, I switched email accounts. My old one kept having this problem where someone would hack into the account and send spam mail to all my contacts, usually with subject lines like, “Check this out,” or, “You won’t believe this!” The third time this happened was the final straw. Of course, when I made the switch, I let all my contacts know. I just forgot to do the same with my commercial subscriptions.

Consequently—and this is the point of this otherwise bizarre anecdote—I never received an email from Panel Syndicate letting me know the latest Private Eye issue was out. It wasn’t until after reviewing the latest Saga did it occur to me that I hadn’t read an issue of Vaughan’s other ongoing in a while. But here we are, better late than never, as some might say. Anyway, I’m sure fans will agree that unlike many series, Private Eye doesn’t suffer for the wait.

The Private Eye #6 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Marcos Martin (art), Muntsa Vicente (colors)

If writers can generally be divided into two camps—the plot-driven and the character-driven—so can readers. I’d definitely say that it’s the characters that do it for me. Obviously, I love stories that have both in equal measure, but I admit that even if the plot is a directionless mess, I will follow along like a lamb to slaughter if the characters leading me on are complicated and interesting. Which is to say that character specialists like Vaughan can always count on my eternal loyalty.

My absolute favorite thing about Vaughan is he takes the time to make every character fully realized, no matter how big or significant their role in the overall story. Too often, comic book writers place their focus entirely on one or two principals, using everyone else as filler. But in a Vaughan comic, even the most inconsequential figures can be compelling on their own.

The Private Eye #5 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Marcos Martin (art), Muntsa Vicente (colors)

The Story: The only thing harder than bursting the cloud is putting it back together.

The Review: When I was a newly-minted freshman in high school, a classmate extended the first overture of digital friendship I encountered in the new millennium.  AIM* was the Facebook of that period, meaning it was largely the province of youths who had way too much time on their hands.  Lord, the many hours I spent hooked to my 56K Netzero connection, just to occasionally participate in the most inane conversations that were mostly emoticons.

At the time, though, this was just about one of the coolest things you could do, along with everything else internet-related.  Nowadays, chatting, downloading, and browsing have become so much a part of my life that I only vaguely recall how I got by without them.  In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine what life would be like if, by some disastrous circumstance, we’d have to live without the internet again.  As Vaughan sets out in Private Eye, however, an internet-less life would probably be an okay one.  In some instances, it might even be an improvement.

The Private Eye #4 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Marcos Martin (art), Muntsa Vicente (colors)

The Review: With all the drama of the past couple issues, I very nearly forgot that this is a detective comic we have in our hands (read: on our screens).  So far, a lot of the developments in Patrick’s newest case have fallen into his lap, though at the cost of a middle finger.  If this is karmic revenge for his initially refusing to take on the case in the first place, but at least he has some incentive to take control of the situation by putting his nose to the ground again.

His first attempt doesn’t bring him quite the results he might have been hoping for, however.  Smooth as he is, he has the misfortune of plying his skills against an equally slippery vendor of “Fine Nyms & Alternate Identities.”  Like any good gumshoe, however, Patrick doesn’t let a flabby woman with a face mask nor her knight in shining armor (literally) stop him.  Raveena sees it as a “total dead end”; Patrick calls it “just a cul-de-sac.”

The Private Eye #3 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Marcos Martin (art), Muntsa Vicente (colors)

The Story: Patrick is deprived of his ability to tell people to f— themselves at the most inopportune moment.

The Review: It makes sense that when you have a story that exists in a world of secrecy, where hardly anyone knows anyone else’s real name (never mind the amorphous thing we call identity), that there’d be some initial distance between you and the characters.  Inevitably, however, the needs of a story demand that we learn more about them and what makes them tick, even if they’re unreliable narrators whose every other word can’t be trusted.

Even Vaughan can’t get away for too long without giving us a little more insight into Patrick and why he does what he does.  Considering the dangers posed by the life of a paparazzi, it can’t just be about the money.  In a surprising development, Patrick’s backstory takes a kind of Batman route: a child, his mother, her imprudent choice, a late night, a chance encounter, a murder, and a life subsequently haunted with unanswered questions:

“What happened…?  You’ll never ever know, will you?  If only there were more cameras in the world.  If only they still had one at that crosswalk.”

Private Eye #2 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Marcos Martin (art), Muntsa Vicente (colors)

The Story: Lord help the mister who comes between a gal and her sister.

The Review: I have to admit, I do love reading a story written by a master storyteller, someone who’s a veteran at all the fundamentals of good narrative work.  Even when the story itself isn’t anything new, if you have someone at the helm with enough experience to get his points across efficiently and to switch up the pace at the right moment, then you’ll get a much more enjoyable read out of it.  Certainly it beats an interesting story poorly done.

With Private Eye, Vaughan displays how honed his chops have become over years of writing top-notch comics.  His first issue set up the series’ world, protagonist, antagonist, and premise in short order without overtly feeling like a set-up, as if Vaughan has gotten so used to this basic kind of work that he can drum it off without thinking.  Here he introduces supporting characters and scaffolds upon the foundation of plot he laid down last month, proving as adept at second issues as he is at firsts.

The Private Eye #1 – Review

By: Brian K. Vaughan (story), Marcos Martin (art), Muntsa Vicente (colors)

The Story: Life can be rough for a man in a future of pay phones and no wifi.

The Review: In Vaughan’s afterword in this issue, he explains why he’s offering The Private Eye strictly online, “where we could offer our new work to readers around the world the second it was finished—DRM free, in multiple languages, for whatever price each reader thought was fair…we thought it was the simplest way to widely distribute what we really about: original stories and beautiful art.”

An inarguably noble motivation, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that it took years of doing major projects with DC (Y: The Last Man) and Marvel (Runaways) for Vaughan to develop the profile he has, and it is only that profile, with all the reputation and credibility that comes with it, that allows Private Eye to reach out to as wide a readership as it does.  How likely do you think a maxiseries about a “futuristic U.S. that no longer used the internet” would find commercial success otherwise?

With that in mind, let’s simply appreciate the good fortune and circumstance that allowed Vaughan to bring such a story to us.  Even more than Saga, which is really an old story in new clothes, Private Eye shows off Vaughan’s cutting imagination in the same way Y: The Last Man did.  From the very first page—heck, from the very cover—the series throws you headfirst into its dazzlingly unique world, threatening to overwhelm you with its bizarre sights and sounds.

So let’s get our bearings.  The place: Los Angeles (our protagonist is reported as fleeing across “upper Wilshire Boulevard”).  The time: some sixty years into the future (a commercial on the “teevee” advertises for an upcoming car sale celebrating the country’s “tricentennial triumph”).  The setting: a society where everybody can choose their “guise,” either by holo tech or flatex; where investigators, journalists, and police have melded and divided into the legitimate “press” and the felonious “paparazzi”; where privacy of identity reigns supreme in the law of the land.

It’s not quite dystopia, but it is a stark vision of the future, and nearly all such futures are preceded by a disaster in the past.  So it goes here: we learn that some decades before, there was the bursting of “the Cloud,” and all the secrets anyone thought to keep within it came raining down for everyone else to see, leading to the world you enter now.  This kind of specific portrayal of the future always bears a message for us in the present, and Vaughan, given his past work, clearly excels at that kind of thing.

An intriguing world to be sure, but what of the characters who will navigate us through it?  Our protagonist is one Patrick Immelman, one of the aforementioned paparazzi, whose style of operation is that of your classic P.I.*  Like most gumshoes, Patrick provides a valuable service on the outskirts of the law, tracking down the most precious commodity of all in this world: identities and secrets.  His latest job (from a beautiful dame—it’s always a beautiful dame), however, will get him involved with more than a guy looking for one last glimpse of his high school sweetheart.  When you’ve got a man looking for you, and that man’s nom de guerre is actually “De Guerre” (translated from the French: “Of War”), you’ve got to take that seriously.

For a story like this, you need an artist who can highlight its uniqueness without actually calling attention to it, and this Martin does brilliantly.  He draws spectacular scenes full of bizarre details with amazing casualness.  If you just glance at any given page, you might take it as a normal slice of life.  But when you take a moment to get a really good look at what you’re reading, you’ll see the incredible richness actually before you: crowds of people where every person has a completely different outfit; rooms chock-full of props; and over it all a retro-modern design sense that feels chic and radical at the same time.  Props to Vicente as well for giving Martin’s somewhat emaciated linework plenty of body and popping hues.

Conclusion: As good of a debut as you can possibly hope for—hip, intelligent, sensitive, and boldly imaginative, on both the written and artistic fronts.

Grade: A

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * Notice the repeating motif of “P.I.”  And here’s one more: on the door to Patrick’s office is л—the symbol for “pi.”