So Many New Tricks: On “Old Dog: Redact One”
Most of us are products of our age, and that can shape our impressions to art in ways we don’t entirely understand from the outset. I’m of an age when my first — and probably most intense — period of reading comic books came just as the founders of Image were starting to make forays from “hot artists” to “hot writer/artists.” Unfortunately, that’s left me a little suspicious whenever someone whose art I’ve enjoyed makes a pivot into writing. That’s not to say that it can’t be done well — or that the writer/artists who left a younger version of me cold didn’t get better as they kept at it. It’s just a little voice in the back of my head with a note or two of suspicion.
My first encounters with Declan Shalvey’s work was as an artist — specifically, through his work with writer Warren Ellis on Moon Knight and Injection. Not long after that, I also read and wrote about Bog Bodies, a crime story that he wrote that was drawn by Gavin Fullerton. Since then, Shalvey-the-artist and Shalvey-the-writer have had relatively different careers; the former collaborated on an X-Men Unlimited story with writer Jonathan Hickman, while the latter has written the science fiction thriller Time After Time and has an upcoming run on Thundercats. It’s a career arc that reminds me a bit of Phil Hester’s — a host of interesting projects as writer or artist, spanning everything from superheroes to horror to science fiction.
Shalvey’s on double duty for the new series Old Dog, however — and the first collection, Redact One, is a good sign of precisely what he’s capable of as both a writer and an artist.
After a quick introductory sequence establishing protagonist Jack Lynch, a grizzled-looking man of action with a penchant for violence and a seemingly preternatural resistance to damage, Shalvey segues into the main event: two stories told in parallel showing Lynch on missions at different points in his life. In one, he’s the grizzled man we saw in the first story; in the other, he’s scarred but much younger-looking. Reading it for the first time, you’d likely assume that the story of the black-haired Lynch is a kind of origin story, explaining how he became the white-haired man seen in the other one.
[Spoilers follow.]
Nope. That’s not what Shalvey is doing here at all; instead, it’s the one with the older-looking Lynch that’s chronologically earlier, and in it, he’s caught in an explosion of a scientific experiment that, when he wakes up years later, has left him both enhanced and with some control over his appearance.
Around the time that he was writing The Wicked & The Divine, Kieron Gillen wrote a fascinating piece about what he dubbed “First It” and “Second It.” First It, Gillen explains, is the pitch behind a given series; in this case, aging tough guy on science-fiction-laced espionage adventures. “The Second It is giving the reader something that wasn’t in the pitch,” Gillen writes. “This normally speaks to the actual truth of what the book actually is, or at least gives a sense of the book’s direction.”
The sense that Lynch has been fundamentally altered by the explosion is, from where I’m sitting, a fantastic execution of Second It. Over the course of the remaining stories in Redact One, Shalvey demonstrates just how much Lynch has been changed by the explosion that left him comatose for years — and it’s something that opens the door to a couple of other genres besides the “spy-fi” alluded to on the back cover copy.
Which genres? That would be telling. But there was a point midway through reading this collection in which I realized that I had no idea whatsoever where Shalvey was taking this story, and that felt utterly thrilling. It doesn’t hurt that the book pulls off telling largely self-contained stories that still feed into the book’s overarching mysteries. That Shalvey is a versatile artist was something I already knew, and his work as a writer with other artists has left me impressed to date. But it turns out he might also be his own best collaborator — and seems to be pushing himself in interesting directions in the process.
As always, I'm Tobias Carroll, and this has been Postcards From Komiksoj.
This newsletter is free, but if you’re so inclined, I have a page at Ko-Fi where you can buy me a (metaphorical) cup of coffee. My novel In the Sight is available here, and details on upcoming readings can be found here.
If you're interested in buying any of the books reviewed in these pages, most of them can be ordered via Bookshop.