THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR BOTH THE SIX FINGERS #1 AND THE ONE HAND #1.
by Matthew Amuso. Let’s get the gimmick out of the way: The Six Fingers #1 isn’t meant to be understood on its own. Dan Watters wants you to read it back-to-back with The One Hand #1, also set in the futuropolis of Neo Novena and penned by his White Noise studio mate Ram V. Together, they present two sides of a murder mystery. Hand places the story under a detective’s magnifying glass, and through Fingers, we see the killer’s point of view. Plot threads dangle in between, and you, the clever reader, are left to tie it all together.
The opening pages of Fingers lean into this sordid concept with dismembered body parts contrasted against a philosophical speech about the gaps in our knowledge, courtesy of our protagonist, student Johannes Vale. Vale is begging some tenured eggheads to fund his dingbat archaeological pet theory — he wants to investigate an arrowhead his father gave him long ago made of an “unknown material,” an unpopular proposal. Before you can say “Indiana Jones,” his hopes for an expedition have been dashed.
Vale’s problems pile up from there. Suffering from a lousy attitude, he is downright rude to the robots at his menial job at a local power plant and gets busted for flouting toxic waste regulations, which in turn grants him the eponymous mutation, a nubby sixth finger. He also discovers some bloody evidence in his possession before his girlfriend (wisely) dumps him. Here, we finally arrive at the hook of the issue: Vale realizes he’s a murderer. The night before, instead of writing his original proposal, he’d graffitied mysterious symbols onto a wall in blood. That’s certainly a more interesting way to pass the evening.
Still, for an unbalanced jerk who’s evidently snapped and chopped up a stranger, Vale’s daily life is pretty dull. There are some meaty chunks of writing here — the murdery bits and the break-up scene go hard — but the connective tissue is thin. The sci-fi cityscape is Blade Runner wallpaper, which peels away to expose plodding story beats underneath. As far as this first issue is concerned, the story could be set in Minneapolis circa last Wednesday without changing anything substantial. Madness and violence took Watters to weird and operatic heights in books like Coffin Bound and Lucifer, but this time, it seems the devil has absconded with his muse.
Luckily, Sumit Kumar pulls his weight on art. In past instances, he’s deftly oscillated between realism and fantasy (These Savage Shores), displaying wild energy when the story calls for it (Man-Bat), but he’s found a comfortable middle ground here. At times, his work is reminiscent of a restrained Sam Kieth: elastic exaggeration is tethered to coarse textures, and dense thickets of cross-hatching suggest something violent is clawing its way through the pages. Background figures are distinct individuals, and his characters emote with vibrancy. Vale’s girlfriend, Galina, is the most believable person in these pages; she fires off a glare that’s murderous in its own right.
Lighting up the space between all that scratchy black ink is colorist Lee Loughridge. Ever the gentleman, he brings a bouquet of toxic yellows and oranges, sickly greens, shadowy purples, and galvanic blues. Loughridge also supplies us with a catacomb-chilled bottle of fine red vintage, sure to flow freely as the corpses mount higher in future issues. Meanwhile, Aditya Bidikar keeps the lettering tactile and lively.
The Six Fingers may work better if you’ve read The One Hand, but that’s no excuse for such a thin introduction. Any proper first issue should grip readers; this is more of a limp handshake. Marvel and DC have saturated the market with crossovers for decades, insisting readers buy multiple issues and tie-ins to appreciate the bigger picture, with routinely disappointing results. We don’t need creator-owned titles pulling the same gimmicks, especially when they’re as talented as this crew.
5 / 10
The Six Fingers #1 is in stores now. For purchasing info, click this.
Image Comics / $3.99
Written by Dan Watters.
Art by Sumit Kumar.
Colors by Lee Loughridge.
Letters by Aditya Bidikar.
by Jarrod Jones. I love detective/serial killer yarns, especially those exploring both the pursued and the pursuer. The One Hand is a comic detective story that functions alongside The Six Fingers, a comic serial killer story. See, they’re connected, two stories that, it’s hoped, will become one as both series reach their respective ends. One story has truths that are obscured in the other, and we readers must piece together the facts to get to The Truth of it all — at least, as we read it.
What an idea! On The One Hand, from writer Ram V and artist Laurence Campbell, you have Ari Nassar, a dogged police detective facing retirement just as his career-making murder case comes back to bite him. Then there’s The Six Fingers, from Dan Watters and Sumit Kumar, which follows the killer Nassar’s put away at least twice, seemingly back from the void and possibly inhabiting some hapless fellow to do their bidding. (We’ll attempt to parse this in a bit.) His modus operandi is slaughtering people (thirty-two random victims and counting) and painting strange symbols in blood at the crime scenes.
When assembled in the deliberate manner of a mind obsessed, those symbols become an uncrackable cipher. Good thing Nassar likes puzzles, especially the kind that hurt. “I don’t mind repetition,” he tells his work-appointed shrink. “Or a little pain.” Nestled in the mold of the pathologically determined police detective, Nassar fits perhaps too snugly.
We’ll come back to those symbols in just a moment. First, our story: Nassar made a name for himself when he collared the killer near the beginning of his career. Years later, there was a second string of murders that belonged to what the Neo Novena police believed to be a copycat, and Nassar nabbed him, too. (We receive this information from two cops who can’t help but sum up Nassar’s career just to clarify His Whole Deal for the reader.) With Nassar’s retirement looming, the One Hand Killer is back to show a new symbol to its fated foe.
I keep jumping around the One Hand’s pronouns because while it’s clear the killer — Johannes Vale of The Six Fingers — is a man, he seems genuinely shocked to discover he’s a murderer. We must assume that the other two men who claimed this moniker operated under a similar fugue state. If that’s so, then the One Hand Killer might be an entity — or an intelligence, in keeping with V and Watters’ future-shocked vision. As Nassar discovers mid-way through this first issue (his android sex companion suddenly glitches out), artificial intelligence is on the fritz. Wouldn’t it be something if Johannes were an android and the One Hand was a rogue program run amok in his circuits?
Anyway, that cipher. It’s designed by comics’ preeminent graphic designer, Tom Muller. (He, colorist Lee Loughridge, and letterer Aditya Bidikar work on both books.) Looking at it scrawled on a wall in both Six Fingers and One Hand, they don’t look painted by fingers so much as stenciled, which is jarring. Is this a quirk of Muller’s design, Campbell’s devotion to it, or a precise expression of a killer’s mind? Maybe it’s all three. It’s the fastidious, deliberate storytelling we’ve come to expect out of White Noise, that London-based studio of comic writers (V, Watters, Alex Paknadel, and Ryan O’Sullivan) who aren’t shy about injecting genre fare with smarts, who flex theme the same way a bodybuilder might with their biceps. Impressive and showy.
Matt’s review mentions that this two-pronged tale is set in the future. 2873, to be exact. That’s quite the quantum leap, yet this world looks no different from our own. The future angle and the androids currently residing in this story’s periphery will be significant on a narrative level soon enough, which I appreciate. Visually, it’s unimaginative. Campbell’s big establishing shot of Neo Novena shows us a sleek L-train and a few unimpressive neon signs, which are given dim glow effects by Loughridge. A grimy future, and dreary to look at. That’s about the extent of the bleeding edge that 850 years of human progress takes us. The automobiles look like they still take gas!
I’m stuck on the details of this world. We’ll still have PCs and wristwatches? Why? If there’s something profound to be gleaned about humanity being so stunted that we can’t jump a thousand years ahead without our heads firmly lodged in the past, The One Hand doesn’t provide it. I hope it does in time; V is too clever a writer to gloss over such a big aspect of this project.
For now, this dimly realized future is but a niggling distraction for us more pedantic comic book readers, who will adore the ambition of The Six Fingers and The One Hand and will doubtless stick around to gnaw on the details of V and Watters’ bigger picture even as we grapple with its anachronisms. More casual readers might look at their well-trodden tropes and grimly rendered vision of the future and come away from it thinking they’ve seen this before and more vividly. Even the most captivating premise is a murky proposition when it’s affixed with too many bells and whistles. Call this cyber-funk.
6.5 / 10
The One Hand #1 is in stores now. For purchasing info, click this.
Image Comics / $3.99
Written by Ram V.
Art by Laurence Campbell.
Colors by Lee Loughridge.
Letters by Aditya Bidikar.
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