Creator: Dustin Weaver ( @dustinweaver12 )
Image Comics, June 2024
We were delighted to have stumbled across this title in a book shop, and dismayed at having never heard of it. It is the most innovative comic we have read so far this year. How could it have evaded our attention? Creator Dustin Weaver has worked up a concoction which is one half noir, one half science fiction, a dash of horror, and a shot of genuine artistic brilliance. Here is publisher Image Comics’ pitch:
By day, Detective Blank is a cop on the trail of a vicious serial killer in the year 1949. But when she sleeps, Blank lives a different life—two hundred years in the future. Is Detective Blank next on the killer’s list? Her dreams may hold the key to the case, if only she can remember them in time. The danger mounts and the suspense builds as the detective closes in, in this genre-bending sci-fi noir thriller. For Detective Blank, to catch the killer will mean facing her greatest mystery—herself.
Mr Weaver’s creative insight is to radically shift his art and colouring depending upon when the plot is at. In 1947, where the murder mystery mostly plays out, Mr Weaver borrows heavily from the artistic style of the masterful Howard Chaykin. Mr Chaykin is an auteurist: he rarely (other than the odd foray into superhero comics) strays from his use of mid-century style, especially in fashion and automobiles, his invocation of graphic design principles around form and line (Mr Weaver uses a universe of tightly woven cheques on the floor of The Blue Cat Cafe), his eroticism, and his use of black ink to convey moody themes and atmosphere (the backroom of Fragos’s apartment, a long, crooked line of light dimming into danger). Mr Weaver even borrows some of Mr Chaykin’s stock character faces:
The page below could well have been created solely by Mr Chaykin. It works perfectly for a noir story set in 1949. Lines convey movement but also draw the reader’s focus to the shadowed nude body of the protagonist, Detective Blank. (Telephones are an ominous portent, as they are in the motion picture The Matrix, which we will explore further.)
Mr Weaver’s Detective Blank has a very curious role in post-war America. The incongruous acquiescence of the men in the police department towards Blank and her activities, the tolerance of the conclusions she comes to from her dreams, remind us strongly of Martin Scorcese’s psychological thriller Shutter Island, a motion picture from 2009 and set in 1954. Shutter Island opens with altogether too many US marshals standing about, tense, silent but playing their part, watching Leonardo DiCaprio’s lead character Teddy begin an “investigation” – actually a roleplay in an elaborate effort by his psychiatrist to enable Teddy to regain his lost personality. Blank is an attractive Hispanic woman in a police department in the late 1940s where the men not just respect her, they show concern for her welfare. Setting aside the sheer improbability of a Panamanian woman becoming a police detective in post-war New York City, there is no degrading of Blank for her gender or ethnicity as we would expect in policing in that age. How much of this is contrived by Mr Weaver, designed to allow Blank to pass through her days as a detective, unmolested by misogyny, so as to solve the mystery?
And, of course, it is.
With the imposition of the future into the story, the art style changes as well. Mr Chaykin is left in the past, and Mr Weaver adopts the intense detail, grand scales, futuristic themes, and eeriness of Moebius, the late, acclaimed French comic book artist. Electric blue floods the panels, in hues never seen in the year 1949, and the enormous and inexplicable sound effect, “DOOOOOOOMM” overlays incomprehensible machinery. Blank is actually Sebastiana, an android with grey blood and a very high degree of emotional intelligence. (A brief conversation with another android, Margaret, highlights the crushing displacement involved in life-hopping, even for an artificial lifeform.) Sebastiana works 200 years in the future for the Department of Historical Investigations, which has as its mission the resolution of crimes committed in the past. She drives about on a powered unicycle that could have come from Mobius’ The Incal, and shares coffee on balconies under elevated traffic and domed skies. Mobius is the primary influence, but as we noted above there are strong flavours of The Matrix – the repeated cadence of a telephone as a trigger for immersion into the past, the use of extremely invasive brain and spine implants as the vehicle for living another life, and the ability to die while living another existence.
Mr Weaver starts the adventure by juxtaposing the two styles in an astonishingly skilful page, switching backwards and forwards between the two artistic styles, a pendulum which sets the story off and away.
But it is only on the last page of this collected work, published in hardcover, does the pendulum cease and the two plots truly become one. It is a cocktail par excellence. Who is this previously hidden genius, Dustin Weaver? Not so hidden, as it evolves, but until recently in the thrall of American franchise work. Downthetubes.net https://downthetubes.net/coming-soon-1949-a-stunning-sf-thriller-by-dustin-weaver/ gives us a biography:
Dustin Weaver began his career in comics as an intern at WildStorm Studios in 2003, where he was held to an unreasonable standard by his idol. Since then, he’s illustrated the New York Times bestselling novel The Tenth Circle, had a fruitful relationship with Dark Horse Comics where he made significant contributions to the star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series, and worked for several years exclusively at Marvel where, most notably, he co-created the acclaimed series S.H.I.E.L.D.: Architects of Forever with writer Jonathan Hickman.
In recent years, Weaver has moved into the writing side of comics. He helped define IDW’s approach to Rocksteady and Bebop in their Ninja Turtles comics by co-writing the duo’s introductory issue and the mini-series Bebop and Rocksteady Destroy Everything!
For Marvel, he has performed as writer and artist for Edge of Spider-Verse and the five-issue series Infinity Gauntlet: Warzones.
Weaver now dedicates himself to his own Image series, including PAKLIS, where “1949” first appeared.