Seems somebody chucked a Cardinal out a window and impaled him on a fence in Vatican City. Who’s the guy to solve the crime? A self-described “prolapsed Catholic” out of London by the name of Charlie Northern.
That’s the premise for Revelations, a new Boom! miniseries from Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos, which gives the former a chance to be snarky and filthy (Charlie nicknames various Vatican folks “Scrotum, Smegma and Dildo”) and the latter a chance to add a lot of shadow and mood to his work while dialing back the hyperkinetic energy we get from him over on Spider-Man comics.
Northern’s old friend he hasn’t seen in fifteen years, Marcel LeClair, is now a cardinal, and he shows up on Northern’s doorstep in the middle of the night to recruit his help in unraveling the mystery behind the murder of Cardinal William Richleau, someone they both knew and who was next in line for pontiff-ication, if that’s a word. Coming upon a badly compromised crime scene, too-incompetent-to-be-true Italian cops and one Cardinal Toscianni dripping with so much general villainy that he can’t possibly actually be the villain, Northern quickly realizes that this whole thing is a massive cock-up that he’s going to have to unravel.
Revelations #1 is a straight-forward murder mystery so far, with promises of either depicting the Catholic Church as incredibly corrupt conspirators or making an atheist be the guy who discovers some crazy Biblical magic truths unfolding, but we don’t know exactly where it’s going yet. Ramos manages to strike a strange balance between his cartoony style and a rainy noir sensibility that works because he’s Humberto Motherscratchin’ Ramos. The jury’s still out on Jenkins’ script – it feels a little too by-the-numbers procedural, but it’s not likely that he’s the kind of writer who would phone it in on a creator-owned project with a talent like Ramos, so there are likely some bigger twists and turns coming down the line.
Revelations #1 is a palatable kind of dark, with characters you can like right away, but it doesn’t quite rocket out of the gate – and that’s fine. It’s got six issues to work with, and not every story has to be a barn-burner. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a whodunit.
