Melinda Snodgrass

I read the first 17 Wild Cards, but I logged that last one eighteen years ago, so I've missed a bunch in the meantime. Unfortunately, the characters in this graphic novel are from books 21-23 and 31, and the author assumes I've been keeping up, leaving me a bit lost in the finer points of this police procedural graphic novel.

Wild Cards is set in a world shaped by a cataclysmic event in the 1940s that released a virus over New York City that gruesomely kills most of the people it infects, but leaves a small number with body-deforming mutations, gives a smaller number powers that amount to useless parlor tricks, and grants the smallest number full-blown super powers. Those with the worse luck live in a slum neighborhood of New York City called Jokertown.

The lead character is Francis "Frank" Black, a legacy police detective with daddy issues who was never infected by the virus. Assigned to Jokertown, he wants to find who removed the skeleton from the pile of skin and muscle that's been found in an alley. But when that case starts to reveal secrets the powers that be would prefer uncovered, he finds himself offered with a distracting high profile operation against Russian mobsters. The various plots get all muddled and I lost interest long before a cheesy showdown tried to tie it all together.

The story is narrated by a character whose identity is not immediately revealed, though it is pretty easy to guess very early on. But the story makes no attempt to justify why or how this character could be the narrator, so the identity reveal feels like only half of a payoff, with a second shoe left undropped.

The other side characters are barely introduced, lowering the stakes considerably when bad things happen to some of them. One character has a ridiculous Barbie doll figure that is unexplained in the book, but some research revealed she is a Joker whose body has the characteristics of a greyhound dog. The artists failed to show the exaggerated canine teeth her prose appearances describe.

The art, by the way, is going for an Alex Ross painted realism that does look pretty good most of the time, but it has a stiffness that fails to convey action sequences well.… (more)