Books: Kop

…by Warren Hammond

Kop is sci-fi detective noir with a dark hard edge.  It’s a well written debut novel with the kind of flawed yet sympathetic protagonist you look for in detective books.  And make no mistake — this is a detective book first and science fiction second.

We’re OK with that.

What Warren Hammond has done is use established elements of conventional sci-fi tropes to create a dingy and corrupt tropical world called Lagarto.  Lagarto is the perfect analogue for a depressed and isolated third-world colony.  Once it had a flourishing single export economy; now it has mostly lizards.  In fact the Lagartans are so poor, so backwards, they barely have any hi-tech at all.  They drive Petrol-fuel cars, there’s no beaming tech, no nano tech, no super net.  It’s a lot like Mos Eisley in a swamp.  In fact, what Hammond has done with Lagarto is to effectively roll back the clock to a very 1930s-type place. 

Review: The Damned: Three Days Dead

…written by Cullen Bunn, art by Brian Hurtt, published by Oni Press.

I saw some promotional material for The Damned two years ago at Wizard World Chicago and thought it looked cool. This last year at WWC I picked up the trade and chatted with the two creators, Bunn and Hurtt. They were cool. Their book is cool.

The basic hook/setting for The Damned: Three Days Dead is a prohibition era gangland caper wherein the criminal underworld is dominated by demons. It’s Hellblazer meets The Untouchables according to one comics reviewer, and that seems pretty accurate. To make a decent go of it in today’s crowded market, an Indie Comic needs some kind of genre-fusion angle to promote, and you’ll see every kind of weird and gimmicky crossover imaginable. In the case of The Damned, while the hook may not be shockingly original–we’ve seen our share of underworld/Underworld stuff (though not so much during prohibition)–the book itself is very well done.