1949

When Sebastiana Blank wakes up in the hospital, about a third of the way into 1949, she cannot speak English and does not understand her surroundings. She is the best detective in the biz — except she's not. Not really.

This is a pivotal moment in Dustin Weaver's recent standalone volume from Image Comics, originally serialized in his one-man-anthology Paklis. Detective Blank, we are told earlier, exists in two parallel points in time. In the titular year, rendered in stark black and white (noir, y'see?), Detective Blank is an ordinary human, born in rural Panama and now living in some American metropolis (note her "accent," replacing "th" sounds with a simple "d" – enough to evoke foreignness without really thinking about an underlying language), in pursuit of the mysterious "Graywater Killer." Two hundred years in the future (rendered in full color), she is a robotic clone (sans accent) in the employ of the Department of Historical Investigations, which seeks to eliminate "cold cases" by transferring the consciousnesses of operatives back in time via machines. Blank herself cannot seem to square her dual consciousness. In the past, she has visions of the future, but she cannot tell whether they are real or just hallucinations – only that they help her catch her culprit.

It's a fun premise, the sort that, played straight, would fare well under the Euro-mainstream umbrella of the sort of "crap" (in the Kim Thompson sense) that Cinebook publishes. Weaver, however, pointedly chooses not to play things straight, adding a key complication. In that hospital scene, where Blank's past and future selves are in a state of disconnect, he makes good on his dystopian overtures (a copy of 1984 — published, not coincidentally, in the year 1949 — rests on Blank's bedside table in the opening scene; her surname is a nod to Buddy Blank, the nobody alter-ego of Jack Kirby's OMAC); Detective Blank, he reveals, was not a real historical figure but a fiction, a random individual hijacked through time by the Department. With every investigation, her "real" life — the one she was supposed to live — is erased.

From this point on, Weaver proceeds to poke holes in his own conceits, with the protagonist's key "superpower" turning out to be her author's undoing. Blank, a de facto time traveler, is working with perfect retrospective knowledge – she knows who the victims are going to be before they're even killed. Weaver does very little to interrogate this element. When Blank drafts up several "potential victims," she says outright that she got these names through visions from the future. This is regarded as unconventional but an otherwise perfectly acceptable, and actionable, methodology. Worse yet, the cartoonist's decision to portray Blank as a seasoned, storied investigator (as we are frequently reminded by her FBI-assigned partner, whose sole function appears to be an awestruck banter machine) results in the dual assumption that her career has always relied on her clairvoyance – yet until now she has never once stopped to question what is going on with these visions in the first place.

In writing his murder investigation, Weaver appears generally helpless. For a detective whose record is unimpeachable, Blank does little investigative work. The few observations she offers on the case itself — the killing at the start of the book, she states, is the first time the killer has ever struck at a victim's home — are never followed up, and are little more than dangling loose ends. The biggest developments in 1949's central murder case are not discovered by her so much as handed to her. In the past, a stabbed woman bursts into the police station just as the killer — an officer from another precinct — happens to visit the station, leading her to commit his incongruous face to memory. In the future, the killer leaves hints at her doorstep. Later, as she chases his mysterious specter, she finds her nose bleeding, inferring that the killer is a fellow time traveler because the fluid that comes out is the same gray material that serves as the killer's calling card.

And what of the positioning of Detective Blank within the Department of Historical Investigations? Weaver seems torn as to how much he is willing to say. On one hand, there is the cold logic that follows from his set-up: surely the idea that even long-dead history is policed, rewritten to inject a heretofore unadministered punishment, has some bearing on how crime is dealt with in the present. Combine that with Detective Blank's "clairvoyance," and you might have a two-pronged criticism of both bloated policing and the arbitrary methods used to enact it.

On the other hand, however, is the author's true-to-form failure to consider his own moral-narrative framing. The dystopian element — the erasure of past lives in the interest of policing — is quickly shrugged away in a monologue from future-Blank as the price we must pay (one imagines a thin blue line, stretching across time), and, given that Weaver is only interested in displaying his protagonist as perpetually correct and justified, it's largely left at that. She is not the good-person-in-a-bad-system mold of police-procedural protagonist; she is a good woman in a system that exists and has some flaws. Duty takes sacrifice! Womp womp, the end.

If Weaver the writer hides his lack of thought behind a succession of competently-unremarkable clues, Weaver the artist hides behind a sheen of Hollywood luster. Although aesthetically handsome, his style is both heavily preoccupied in a polish so deeply ingrained that it transcends the visual and becomes almost ideological. In Weaver's world, everything has to be clean, intact; where there is damage, it is heroic, a teleological suspension to guarantee strength even at a time of ostensible weakness. His coloring resembles that of colorists such as Paul Mounts or Justin Ponsor (the latter of whom colored much of Weaver's work for Marvel prior to Ponsor's passing in 2019). It is oppressively saturated and gradient-heavy, and never, ever shaded. It is a world comprised entirely of shiny surfaces, fundamentally incompatible with meaningful drama or stakes. Weaver tries to make up for this with his compositions, angles rapidly changing high and low, but the result is the exact opposite, a largely arbitrary freneticism that will break any rules of logic — the 180-degree rule is discarded with abandon depending entirely on who is the first to speak in a given panel — to evade, inelegantly as necessary, any accusations of repetitiveness.

The black-and-white portions of the comic, meanwhile, see Weaver attempt to rethink the components of his own style; his forms and geometries, with the addition of half-tone textures, will on occasion take on an elongated look reminiscent of Nick Dragotta, whereas the controlled jaggedness of his inks bring to mind Sean Phillips (by now synonymous with dependably-uninspiring crime/thriller comics). It's an interesting marriage, but one that is bound to end in divorce. Beneath these cosmetic modifications, Weaver is still, fundamentally, himself, his visual language unchanging, still refusing to get his hands dirty. Failing to account for the dramatic potential offered by chiaroscuro and black-and-white values, the decision to leave the 1949 portions uncolored comes across as a hollow, entirely-noncommittal gesture.

At the end of the story, the time-traveling serial killer is caught, but not before his future self kills Blank's future body, leaving her consciousness stranded in the past. No longer an operative, she is free to live as a person, and she decides to course-correct by planning a return to Panama. There is not even the ideological dignity of walking away from Omelas. She is pried out, without choice, without power, and without much interest in dwelling on it. A telling note for Weaver to finish on: that all-encompassing evil, worthy of Orwell and Kirby, survives unchanged, but a happy ending is still within reach. All you need to do is close your eyes.

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