Brian K. Vaughan is a critical darling. You walk into any comic shop and ask what book you should be reading, and they’ll likely mention Saga, as well they should. Y The Last Man, Ex Machina… the guy is great at thrusting you into a world he’s fully fleshed out and running with it. At the request of Nick Mitchell, a loyal fan of Crave Online’s Book Report podcast (we should come up with a name for our fans – Book Reporters? BRainiacs?), I checked out The Private Eye, the web-exclusive comic project Vaughan is doing with Marcos Martin over at PanelSyndicate.com with a ‘name your own price’ kind of honor-system deal. Being a bit of an old-school fuddyduddy who is just now starting to transition to digital comics in order to lessen the massive funnybook clutter in the living space, I had heard of The Private Eye but hadn’t investigated it. Now I have. So thanks to Nick for turning me onto something pretty fascinating – the notion of a post-internet culture.
There are four issues of The Private Eye available, and I threw down some cash for all of them, because Vaughan has more than earned my trust, even if I took a long time to really settle into Saga. It opens in Los Angeles with a creepy guy with a camera invading the privacy of a woman who is peeling off a full-on Mission: Impossible rubber mask to reveal her true self, and he’s snapping photos. Suddenly, the cops show up and chase him down, reporting him as “paparazzi,” which seems to be the most reprehensible of crimes in this version of the future, but it’s an exciting chase that involves jumping on a moving train and using an interesting bit of invisible-cloak (or in this case, half-assed invisible hoodie) technology to elude capture. Given the action-adventure pursuit, it dawns on the reader fairly quickly that this paparazzo is actually going to be our protagonist.
See, the internet is gone in this world, because The Cloud, she burst about 60 years ago. By that, it means that absolutely everything about everybody that the internet could record was exposed for everyone to see – including creepy-ass search histories – and that information was used to destroy many, many people. They called it The Flood. Therefore, the resulting paranoia not only made the internet a thing of the past, but has prompted every average joe anywhere to hide themselves under layers of more elaborate disguises, called “nyms” – including fish masks, expensive holograms and even furry outfits (although don’t let that scare you, since that’s done with some ironic flair). This makes for a really weird-looking society, although nyms are apparently something you have to reach a legal age to adopt.
Our paparazzo goes by the pseudonym Patrick Immelman (aka P.I., haw haw), and he works as a private eye for hire (or actually, we could say ‘private dick’ because he’s kind of a dick), but he calls himself an “unlicensed journo,” and it bears mentioning that the cops that chased him down earlier identified themselves as The Fourth Estate – a common term for the press. The main guy is a dude called Deputy Correspondent Strunk, which means the police and the mainstream media are now one and the same. But P.I. gets hired by a mysterious woman named Taj McGill to dig up as much information as he can about her, just to find out what dirty secrets potential employers could dig up about her. By the end of the first issue, she’s dead, and her sister eventually comes into the picture to encourage P.I. to stay on the case – which he refuses to do until some jerks in specialized masks try to kill him and torch his place. Seems Taj went rogue from a group run by a bastard named De Guerre, who’s trying to kill off anyone who might threaten his master plan, which involves a giant rocket.
Vaughan’s talent for fascinating concepts and engaging characters is on full display here, drawing us in a lot more quickly than Saga did. This isn’t an ongoing story, though – their plan is for a ten-issue maxi-series, and so I’d recommend you plunk down some mad scrilla when you download these issues to keep the party going. It’s very much a detective story, with fascinating science fiction elements and a highly amusing, heavily-tattooed Gramps of P.I. who is a former doctor, but also an elderly refugee from the internet era who occasionally forgets that his precious, precious smartphone doesn’t work anymore. It’s amusing to imagine the reckless, hypersharing youth of today as shitty old men who still say ‘dude.’ Martin’s art is also impressively elaborate and wildly varied in depicting the sheer breadth of human disguise-work, and I’ve come to really appreciate bright, clean panels and fantastic colors where everything pops, as opposed to the muddy, gritty style you’d likely see in most any other noir book.
All in all, I’ll gladly recommend The Private Eye to others, and big props to Vaughan and Martin for getting each issue formatted perfectly for your preferred reader – the CDisplay interface has never been easier, and it’s a pleasure not to have to do the annoying little scroll-up-and-back you would have to do for standard digitally-scanned comic pages. Check it out, won’t you?
