|
|
|
||||||||
SAM & TWITCH-A REVIEW
You're name is Twitch. you're sitting in a bar, nursing a drink and a smoke and a pretty lady you don't know comes up to you and comments on the hat which isn't yours. She spends some time chatting you up, picking your brain; finding interest about your being a cop. Finally, you give in and begin to relate the details of the past day or so.And this is how SAM AND TWITCH, one of the most unexpected and pleasant surprises of the year, begins. The book, a spinning-off of the two very popular characters from Todd McFarlane's SPAWN, is written by AKA GOLDFISH and JINX scribe Brian Michael Bendis, with pencils by KISS PSYCHO CIRCUS' Angel Medina and inks by Jonathan Glapion.
First, the back story. Sam is the fat one who eats a lot of sweets and cusses a lot. Twitch is the wiry one who recently had brain surgery. They use to be cops, quit the force and formed their own PI Agency. Money gets tight and things look bleak, just as their old Lieutenant asks them to join the force again. And they do.
The boys go to a gangland hit crime scene and notice that there is a collection of severed thumbs lying around. But the thumbs belong to none of the deceased and, if that wasn't weird enough, it appears they have all been cloned and are in various states of construction. It's pretty obvious that all four thumbs came from the same source.
No sooner than Sam figures out his favorite fast food joint forgot his waffle fries than a call comes in saying there's a double homicide at a diner where the victims heads have been spun about and there are four ears on the table. Quicker than you can imagine, Lieutenant Barnes is calling them on the carpet to solve the first crime(especially since the shift Captain lost his head over it...literally!) and there's another murder. This time someone has lost his member.
But, you guessed it, it doesn't belong to either of the murder victims.
Time quickly becomes of the essence as the federal officials are preparing to take over the case. Sam meets with a snitch and he and Twitch head over to a place called Karelene's They arrive just in time to see a mysterious trenchcoat wearing figure toting about the severed head of Lieutenant Barnes. Sam chases him to the roof and it seems that he might meet his maker when Twitch pulls of a miraculous blindman's shot and kills the attacker.
And here we are, back at the bar with Twitch and the woman. Oh, did I mentioned that she's a member of Internal Affairs and the boys are now in a world of trouble? Well, they are.
And that doesn't even begin to cover the fact that Twitch' wife tossed him out, that someone is injecting people with a deadly hyper flu virus, and that Internal Affairs is ready to string these guys up by their genitalia. That's just some of the good stuff in issue #3.
This series is just WAY too much fun to be associated with the SPAWN universe. SPAWN is dark and twisted in a comic book sort of way (after, we DO have to appeal to the kids). CURSE OF SPAWN was so nasty that, despite being extremely well written AND illustrated, it almost made you want to take a long bath when you were through. SPAWN THE DARK AGES tries way to hard to be lofty and classic in a MORE THAN MORTAL historical sort of way and SPAWN THE UNDEAD is just a cheap attempt at cashing in on the McFarlane cash cow.
But SAM AND TWITCH is different. In fact, despite it's grisly attitude, this book is a laugh riot in the way that PULP FICTION was funny. Amidst the buckets of gore, Sam finds time to bitch about getting screwed out of his fries. In the middle of a crime scene where people have head their heads twisted around, he asks how much a cheesesteak goes for. Twitch makes a reference to THE GODFATHER which takes the better part of a page to explain. Sam shows up late for his Internal Affair hearing, explaining to the lady that he "had to take a squirt". Sam wants to have the female coroner look at the "Bobbitized" member, saying it would be the first one she had seen in a while.
Her response: "when was the last time you saw yours?"
Brian Michael Bendis is well known among fans of crime fiction. His dark sense of humor has always carried through his previous works. Here, he wears it straight out on his sleeve. The dialogue flows so naturally off the characters' tongues that you tend to overlook the frequent obscenities. And yes folks: there are FREQUENT OBSCENITIES!
Angel Medina's work has never looked so good as it does here. He has always had a great attention to detail but here he takes the cake. His characters show all the emotion that Bendis writes into them and more. The look of sheer horror when Sam discovers the Lieutenant's head in the hand's of the trenchcoat murderer is pure delight, as is Twitch' gaze when he learns he has been set up by Internal Affairs.
This is NYPD BLUE meets BUFFY. The characters are coarse and foul. Their situations are honest and bizarre. Their emotions are as real as they get.
So sit back, pull up a nice warm blanket for these winter months, turn the lights down low, and dive into SAM & TWITCH. You'll eat it up! Speaking of which, how much WAS that cheesesteak?