Review: You Have Killed Me by Rich & Jones

by Chriss Cornish published: July 19, 2010 No Comments

This Book Is About

Things just can’t get any worse for Antonio Mercer. A private eye by trade, a dame from his past has re-surfaced in his life as a client along with all of the emotional baggage he thought he’d left behind forever. Of course, this unusual client doesn’t have just any case – her family is mixed up with seriously dangerous people and the body count is just starting to pile up!

My Thoughts On This Book

I’ve been looking forward to reading You Have Killed Me ever since the 2009 Comic-Con. This noir detective graphic novel sounded right up my alley when Oni Press talked about it their panel, so I went by their booth to check it out and it looked right up my alley too. Sadly, my limited Con cash was earmarked for non-ISBN items. So you can imagine my excitment when I saw the book on my local Library’s shelf of ‘new’ titles.

This is a classic hardboiled detective story in the noir tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammet. Antonio Mercer is a private detective who was once a member of high society until he turned his back on his father’s fortune and took up gumshooing. He’d once had a youthful romance with the socialite Julie Roman, but that ended painfully for Antonio (though details are never given). When Julie dissapears a few days before her wedding, her sister comes to Antonio and asks him to find her for them; the assumption being that her old flame will know her hangouts. But this is noir, and that someting rotten in Denmark ends up reeking of obsession and murder.

I like how the 1st person narration is sparce, since a lot of that can really clutter up the flow of a graphic novel; the pacing asn writting are good. When I finished You Have Killed Me, I felt like I may have heard this one before. But, then, it’s a little of all the best noir detective plots mingled and tweaked so that’s not a bad thing.

Artwork

The illustrations for You Have Killed Me are great. There are lots of good ‘camera’ angles and they played with the frame just enough to keep the feel fresh and open feeling.

The artwork style has a sort of cartoon-esque realism that I really like and which fits great with the setting. They also play with textures in a way that surprised and pleased me. For instance, the main character wears a rough weave tweed suit and they used a dark gray canvas texture to fill the lines of his jacket and pants. And in the one scene where Antonio is driving and thinking, the back window of his car is filled with an old black and white photograph of a period street.

I also like how they judiciously used black pages here and there so they could play with the framing and action in dark (lighting wise) scenes. For instance, when Atonio is driving in his car and when he’s dodging fire in a house at night.

Shade-tastic or Blank-city: How Well Was This B&W Comic Shaded

They did really well with the shading in this one. The inking is great and they clearly have a masterly command of those little shading dots, which they vary in size, darkness, and density, to show shadows, skin color, and accent mood.

This is REALLY important with black and white comics, since I and many others can have a severely hard time differentiating objects if the shading and inking isn’t done well. No such problem, of course, with You Have Killed Me. It was easy to follow action, quickly identify what’s important in a panel, tell people apart, and pick out objects.