What becomes of an old detective at the end of their days? Scott Snyder and Jock have told plenty of noirish tales, and the main character of their new DSTLRY series You Won’t Feel a Thing, having spent most of his life and career chasing serial killers, could likely have starred in a few of them. But what happens now that death has come for him, not in the form of a masked murderer but as a tumor applying increasing pressure on his brain? Can he go quietly into that dark night, or will unfinished business have him going down fighting?
Our terminally ill detective is living in an assisted living facility called, almost mockingly, Harmless House in the Montana town where he grew up. It’s also the Montana town where someone brutally murdered his first girlfriend, perhaps sparking his choice of career and obsession with the possibly invented serial killed he’s dubbed The Chatter Man.
While the night of that murder is decades in his past, the memories are kept fresh by recall exercises he undergoes with his aide. He’s asked to tell her what’s behind different doors, with each threshold leading to a different time in his life. While he only reports mundane details to her, the reader sees inside his mind, with Snyder providing internal monolog narrating a young boy’s first love and first time with the same smoky prose more often employed for scenes occurring in a P.I.’s office.
Doors and what hides behind them are recurring themes throughout the book, whether they contain a memory, an eager lover, or a violent killer. Snyder also positions the blank smiles of Harmless House’s denizens as suggestive of an emptiness within. It’s the same gleeful obliviousness the detective sees in his infant grandson’s face before the tumor turns it into something terrifying, reemphasizing the link between youth and the end of life established by the earlier flashback to his teenage years.
That blurring of the real and the unreal makes this the type of story Jock excels at. Using a style that is like a more controlled Bill Sienkiewicz, Jock’s thick black lines move between rigid and irregular with ease as the panels of his layouts seem to float above larger backgrounds, Lee Loughridge’s colors saturating the visuals with cool darkness or searing, violent warmth as the scene requires. He leaves no mark to indicate the gaps missing in time as we see events through our protagonist’s eyes, ensuring the disorientation and confusion hit us with the same impact as it hit him, relying on Snyder’s persistent narration to provide clear narrative continuity.
“You won’t feel a thing” is a phrase told to those undergoing a frightening but necessary process. Maybe it’s going under anesthesia before surgery, or it’s letting go of one’s grip on one’s existence and transitioning to the other side of the ever-opaque door between life and death. Though it is never said, it’s the phrase that temps this detective as he grows closer to death and increasingly accepts his fading relevancy, even seeking it out to ease the pain that has lingered with him for years. Can he shrug that malaise off and face the pain again as The Chatter Man rears his head?
You Won’t Feel a Thing #1 is a moody debut issue loaded with pathos and undergirded with a nebulous mystery. Is The Chatter Man real? Is he connected to Harmless? Or is it more personal than that? Can we put to rest the demons lurking in the closets of our lives before turning out the light on our existence? Snyder and Jock offer no easy answers here, only a murky mist of unanswered questions and unreliable narrators, but that only makes the tale more engrossing. There’s an unmistakable sense that there’s more going on here beneath the surface, and You Won’t Feel a Thing #1 will have readers eager to keep digging.
Published by DSTLRY
On January 15th, 2025
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Jock, Dom Reardon
Colors by Lee Loughridge, Jock
Letters by Andworld Design
Cover by Jock
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