Hexed
by Michael Alan Nelson, Emma Rios (Boom!, 2008)

It begins at a nightclub, with an angel's severed wings. It ends swimming in the guts of a newly dead fat man.

Hexed is a book about Lucifer, but don't mistake this one for the suave individual over at Vertigo. The Boom! Studios version of Lucifer is a cute, young-seeming girl with a gift for arcane "recovery" missions. Or, if you prefer, she's a really good thief who specializes in the mystic.

Lucifer -- that's short for Luci Jenifer Inacio das Neves -- is an intriguing new character who makes her debut from the growing Boom! stable of characters. If you're not familiar with Boom!, check out some of their work -- for a young comics publisher, the company is logging a solid record with more hits than misses. Hexed looks like a hit.

Luci works for the owner of an upscale art gallery, but not, obviously, on the art side of the business. With only hints to tell of us of Luci's rough history, we sense she is content with her current lot -- until a debt collector from her past appears to settle affairs. Turns out this is a debt she can't escape ... and paying it will neither be easy nor pleasant.

Series writer Michael Alan Nelson has already impressed me with his storytelling in Second Wave, and he seems to have another winner on the way. I certainly hope to learn more about Luci as this story unfolds. I'm less thrilled with the art by Emma Rios, which is just on this side of looking done. It's just a little uneven; her pencils are polished on some pages, while others look as though a good inker was needed to finish it off. It's distracting, but not so much as to take away from the story.

Send me the next one, Boom! I'm hooked on Hexed.




Rambles.NET
review by
Tom Knapp

25 October 2008


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