Despite conquering books, movies and television, Sherlock Holmes hasn’t made much of an impact in comic-book form. You can kind of see why in Transfuzion Publishing’s SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE CASES OF THE TWISTED MINDS, an anthology that rounds up three previously published stories from independent writers and artists.
It opens with Steven Phillip Jones and Seppo Makinen’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Holmes,” in which the great detective comes up against Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic creation of duality. The writing and art are competent, but the problem is that since we already know the Jekyll/Hyde tale, there’s nothing in our minds to be solved. Therefore, it’s entirely anticlimactic.
More fun is to be found in “Adventure of the Opera Ghost,” again written by Jones and illustrated with more detail and verve by Aldin Baroza. As the title suggests, this story pits Holmes against Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, and their cat-and-mouse chase is full of mood and Gothic thrills.
Finally, there’s the brief “The Amazing Mr. Holmes,” plopping him in the middle of a garden maze, trying to beat the clock. It’s the maze owner’s identity that gives Gary Reed and Wayne Reid’s story its greater a-ha moment, however small.
Although the level of creativity there isn’t extraordinary, it and the rest of the book are done no favors by Transfuzion’s horrible presentation. The art appears light in spots — some letters fade away entirely — and more often fuzzy at the edges, as if it were all scanned at a resolution too low for printing. That’s unforgivable, especially for a graphic novel, where image is everything. How that managed to suffice as final product is a bigger mystery than any of its scripted ones.
Better is Dynamite Entertainment’s SHERLOCK HOLMES VOL. 1: THE TRIAL OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, collecting the series’ first five issues, written by spouses Leah Moore and John Mark Reppion. Their story is great: A former commissioner receives a letter stating he will be assassinated at an exact date and time, so Holmes and Watson go to his home to be of service.
With several minutes still left to go on the clock, Holmes is summoned alone to talk with the man in his bedroom. As the hour strikes, however, shots are fired. Watson, Inspector Lestrade and the police rush to the room and find the commissioner dead of a gunshot wound, with Holmes holding the smoking gun. No one else has been in or out of the locked room.
That’s a fine setup for a whodunit, because how can our hero prove his innocence from jail? The problem with TRIAL is, unfortunately, Aaron Campbell’s art, or at least just in the way it’s inked. Everything is outlined too heavily, and the shading is worse, with splotches of pure black. It’s as if the characters have been scarred, splattered with mud or are in the midst of turning into WATCHMEN‘s Rorschach.
Still, it’s the story, stupid, and this one is strong enough that Moore and Reppion take on another arc. —Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• ALBION by Leah Moore and John Reppion
Related posts:
- Klinger offers ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES bookplates
- Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #3
- The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The War of the Worlds
- Sherlock Holmes on the Stage: A Chronological Encyclopedia of Plays Featuring the Great Detective
- The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
