Jan-Ken-Pon – The Veil #1 review

    
Comic books, particularly the non-big II titles really only have to accomplish two things. One, they have to have a premise that allows for an interesting and identifiable synopsis (especially due the distribution method of most of the medium), and two they need to transcend that very description with the pages. It doesn’t have to be the graphic novel version of House of Leaves, as rarely is a combination of quality and tapping into an existing audience something that deviates to the extreme. Those that do and succeed are both rare and brilliant (like House of Leaves). We are talking nuance, not revolution. Distinction can derive from many sources and on the surface or in verbal description The Veil doesn’t really stand out. We’ve seen characters that are able to interact with the dead, we have seen (though often poorly) some level of humble living even with a supernatural skill in something like a Dresden, and we’ve seen the characters damaged due to occurrences their past– and a combination of all of them. Yet, The Veil still succeeds.

The basic gist of the first issues is that we meet Chris Luna, a down on her luck girl for reasons involving present personal finance and a traumatic past. The former issues is due to that her clientele often times forget to pay her, the latter is why you buy the book. She gets an offer to sell a family home in Maine, and decides to make the trip to finalize the sale. Did I mention she sees, talks to, and works for the dead?

Any Dresden readers out there? I don’t want to give people the wrong idea, there is no similarity, indeed The Veil may be the antithesis, but for those that are familiar with the series, do you know how it seems like Harry is this unique entity that’s depicted as getting by in our world? Sure he has problems, but the everyman treatment is a (I think purposeful) failure and he instead comes off as larger than life. It’s about Harry and all of that living in ‘our’ world and coping. It makes him unique. It also make others – or us – not so. The success of The Veil is that it feels like ‘our world’–there is no detachment privy to a unique entity or individual. Where many times a character will be some kind of Eastwood-fetish expressed by an author, in The Veil though the supernatural is all around us, we never lose place. Our place. It’s not even just due to the fact that we are blatantly told of Chris Luna’s financial problems, an occurrence that indeed that may be a bit heavy handed. It is instead the atmosphere that pervades this issue, not anything we see the characters say. Excluding her ability, Chris is everyday people. Since she is everyday people, her mental state becomes something unspoken yet still understood. If you have the ability she has, your mental state would be off. There would be a strain, and we feel it in this issue; something is just not right, just like not everything is right with our own lives. It’s not a cartoon.

I don’t know how to say this without sounding either pretentious or a twit, but The Veil feels like a European title, but one that is successfully telling a very American horror vignette that is the life of Chris Luna. I don’t know how to explain the former statement, but walking through the stores here is a completely different experience than walking through a U.S. LCS. There is an extra level to the care here, and if it did or not, even just this first issue feels like something that has gone through a painstaking process. This story has gone and been rendered in several directions until it got here, and we feel that Chris Luna existed before we picked up this book- in this our first experience with her.

What you need to know about Maine is that it’s a speculative fiction mecca, and the fictional Crooksville used by the team of Torres and Hernandez is perhaps not too far away Castle Rock, Rockwell, Collinsport, or Black River–other locales that perhaps resides just through a veil of their own. What you also have to know is this is not the adventures of Chris Luna, ass-kicking paranormal PI. It’s instead a snapshot of somebody’s life; a looker who dresses like a tomboy that thought she left her past behind her; a rare comic that deserves its Ashley Wood cover. It taps into that again very relatable feeling of going back to old stomping grounds. It’s a surreal feeling, but one firmly rooted in reality, and often confrontational. What sounds like a mystery is simply revelation due to witnessing something rather uncommon.

I think we may have a real horror comic book on the stands.

    
- Jay Tomio

_{Jan-ken-pon is the time traveling, force-walking, multiverse crossing column of Jay Tomio, owner of 1/3 of everything you see currently on screen, and the editor of Heliotrope. Some call him the Bodhisattva.}

About Jay Tomio

...Jay Tomio is the co-owner of BSCreview and BSCkids--check out Jan-ken-pon, his time traveling, force-walking, multiverse crossing column. You should probably become his disciple through twitter @JayTomio. More fun awaits at the Vogue Immunity and at Spiff Six Shot