Turf #2

When Image sent me this Turf #2, I thought:  Cool!  Prohibition mob stuff with good art (Tommy Lee Edwards, my favorite part of Marvel 1985, does all the work, including the colors).  As it was the second issue, I went to my local comic book dealer and picked up #1.II figured I had to know the whole story if I was going to write up a review of #2–plus good art with gangsters and molls made a good sell!

Something really caught me off guard about the cover to the first issue when I picked it up though:  More gangsters and a space ship.

It got weirder right away.  Reading, I immediately noticed that there were vampires.  Vampires, aliens and a prohibition-era crime story?  Reading any kind of fiction requires some sort of suspension of disbelief.  For Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein you need to believe that Dr. Frankenstein can create life.  For Daredevil, you have to believe, at minimum, in superpowers and the ability to jump between buildings in Manhattan.  For Twilight–well, let’s be honest, I have no clue there.  The initial problem with Turf is that, as a reader, you are trying to force that internal, and usually automatic, system to swallow three genres at once–a big pill to swallow.

I think have swallowed it.  Part of what makes it so easy to swallow is the narration style of the author, Jonathan Ross. The first issue was dense with dialogue between many characters, but that dialogue laid out the story in an easy to read way that may the pill the go down easy.

Who is Jonathan Ross?  This is his first comic book.  It turns out that he is a very public face in England.  Mark Millar, in his afterward in issue one describes him as  “Letterman, Stern, Siskel and Ebert all rolled up in a Saville Row suit.”  I still really have no clue…  It may have been his fame that got him in the door for his first comic book, but I believe I am along for the rest of the ride.

Good art and an interesting (if dense) story, still a great deal at $2.99 for 25 pages.

Bottom Line:  $2.99/$2.99

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