Past Lies

A couple of weeks ago, Oni released a great neew mystery / suspense / crime fiction hardcover graphic novel called Past Lies, written by the Christina Weir and Nunzio Defilippis and drawn by Christopher Mitten. Weir and Defilippis also wrote the excellent graphic novels Skinwalker and Three Strikes, for Oni, so I was pretty sure that Past Lies would deliver.

The central character of Past Lies is Amy Devlin, an aspiring unlicensed private eye, who is very good at unearthing aspects of a crime that others have overlooked. Past Lies has a lot of mystery and suspense, takes the reader through some great twists, with great dialogue and pacing and has great characters that aren't unbelievable as some main characters can be in a lot of works of crime fiction. The art by Christopher Mitten, who also draws Wasteland, isn't anything real stylized like Darwyn Cooke or as atmospheric as Sean Phillips, but it perfectly moves Past Lies along and is pleasant to the eyes.

If you were thinking of picking up the first graphic novel by New York Times best-selling author Janet Evanovich, called Troublemaker, published by Dark Horse about a month or so ago, don't - that was one of the lamest graphic novels I've read in some time. It certainly didn't seem in the crime fiction genre that it was purported to be in, the characters were so undefined and not interesting that I was only glad that it didn't take me very long to read Troublemaker (and with that in mind, Troublemaker also is not a good return for its harcover price). I've enjoyed Troublemaker artist Joelle Jones previously (You Have Killed Me and Spell Checkers), but her art here just looks annoyingly cute (I guess it mirrors the vapidness of the story though).

Anyway, I just went a long way to say a lot of negative things about Troublemaker, when basically I should have just said avoid the over-hyped Troublemaker and pick up Past Lies (which should have gotten the attention that Troublemaker got before its release - and I've never read any of Evanovich's best-selling novels so this just might be a foul ball on her part, because it's true that you're not going to hit it out of the park every time at bat).