The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh - Mark Waid

A while back I read and posted about THE UNKNOWN, the first volume of a graphic novel series written by Mark Waid and drawn by Minck Oosterveer.  Now I've read THE DEVIL MADE FLESH, a trade paperback collecting the second mini-series about terminally ill occult detective Catherine Allingham.

At the end of the first volume, Allingham had six months to live because of the tumor eating away at her brain, but as THE DEVIL MADE FLESH opens, more than a year has passed, she's still alive, and she's bothered by selective amnesia that means she doesn't remember her former assistant James Doyle.  She has a new assistant, a beautiful blonde named Adriana, and she's still traveling all over the globe solving bizarre mysteries that have some paranormal aspect.

But then there's a plot twist I didn't see coming at all, and Catherine and Adriana find themselves heading for a small town in Alabama that's plagued by a serial killer whose victims all leave mysterious one-word messages scrawled in their own blood.  And all of those words are different.

Waid does a great job of layering in the clues and tying everything together so that it all makes sense, including Catherine Allingham's amnesia and the fact that her brain tumor hasn't killed her like it was supposed to.  There's plenty of action, and Oosterveer's artwork has grown on me to the point that I really like it.  This particular storyline comes to a satisfactory conclusion, but Waid obviously has more in mind.  I'll be on the lookout for the next volume in this series.  Recommended.


UPDATE: One of the blog's readers has passed along the sad news that artist Minck Oosterveer died in a motorcycle accident on September 17.

The Unknown - Mark Waid

Over the years I’ve read a lot of superhero comics written by Mark Waid, and I’ve found his work to be consistently entertaining. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anything by him that’s like this graphic novel, though. The protagonist of THE UNKNOWN is Catherine (Cat) Allingham, a beautiful young woman who happens to be the world’s greatest private detective. She can solve a difficult case just by glancing around, and she doesn’t even have to be at a crime scene to figure out what happened. But there’s one particular mystery that’s she determined to solve.


She has an aggressive brain tumor and less than six months to live, so she wants to find scientific proof of an afterlife.


Plagued by hallucinations caused by her tumor, she takes on an assistant, a massive former bar bouncer named Doyle who happens to be a pretty smart guy himself, though not on Cat’s level. Together they wind up in a dangerous chase across Europe as they try to recover a stolen scientific device that may prove vital to Cat’s quest. However, this search leads them to places they may not want to go.


This is great stuff, poignant and intelligent and sharply written, and the art by Minck Oosterveer seems to me to have a definite Will Eisner influence. I hope there are more of these, because I want to find out what happens to Cat and Doyle next. If you’re a fan of offbeat, occult detective yarns, I recommend THE UNKNOWN.

Captain America: Man Out of Time - Mark Waid

Since I’ve started reading comics again, there’s no doubt my favorite character has been Captain America. This volume reprints a recent mini-series that’s a retelling and expansion of events first chronicled in AVENGERS #4 – 8.


Now, I bought all those issues brand-new off the spinner racks at Trammell’s Grocery and Tompkins’ Pharmacy, so I was familiar with the story. But Mark Waid, one of the more dependable comics writers these days, does a good job and doesn’t monkey too much with what happened in those nearly-50-year-old stories. And it always does this old man’s heart good to see the original Avengers again, looking and acting like they did back then. The art by Jorge Molina and Karl Kesel is pretty good, too, with some decent storytelling.


To me, the appeal of this volume is primarily nostalgic, but even if you didn’t read those AVENGERS issues ’way back when, this is a good solid superhero yarn. Recommended for the comics fans among you.