Bad Luck Chuck #1 - Featured Reviews 

“Bad Luck Chuck” #1

By | March 29th, 2019
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Imagine, if you will, a vortex of the worst luck imaginable. The anti-Domino. The living embodiment of Murphy’s Law. Drop them into a crime thriller, complete with cults and an insurance investigator and what do you have? A hell of a first issue is what. Oh, and there may be a few spoilers ahead.

Written by Lela Gwenn
Illustrated by Matthew Dow Smith
Colored by Kelly Fitzpatrick
Lettered by Frank Cvetkovic

She’ll need more than a rabbit’s foot to get through this.

Cursed at birth, Charlene “Chuck” Manchester hires out her own bad luck, providing disaster where someone else can profit. She can get you that insurance payout fortune—for a price. But bad luck doesn’t always go as planned, and when Chuck gets stuck between a dissatisfied crime boss client, a cult leader, and a dogged insurance-fraud investigator, things get . . . explosive.

Everything that could go wrong does—and only about half of it by accident.

Upon my first read, “Bad Luck Chuck” #1 failed to impress. There was a choppiness to the pages, as if in turning the page, I was skipping over what used to be there. As if the characters and world were conspiring to push me forwards, barreling towards the final page and the true start to the story. However, upon further inspection, and a second read, I realized that my misgivings towards the comic were born from my overexposure to the exposition heavy comics I’ve grown accustomed to reading.

There is a great economy of information and narrative propulsion at play in “Bad Luck Chuck” #1; a whirlwind of events, questions, characters and events, all piling up on top of each other to set the stage for what is to come. Take page one. Doing more in five panels than many Big Two (or even Image) comics do in an entire issue, Gwenn, Smith, Fitzpatrick, and Cvetkovic establish: Chuck’s personality, the basic premise, and the tone of the comic. With 5 small narrative captions, 4 concise speech balloons and artwork that illustrates all that goes unsaid, all that is implied, in those short sentences, it really is a brilliant sequence of panels.

Smith’s artwork set the genre of the story, evoking past and current noir & crime comics from the likes of Sean Phillips, Michael Gaydos and every artist who worked on “Gotham Central.” The whole comic has a grungy feel to it, with heavy, deep shadows that cover faces and scenes. Smith’s scratchy linework contributes to this while Fitzpatrick’s coloring balances grounds the comic, with colors that pop but remain washed out by the dark and the dirt of the city. Cvetkovic mirrors this in his word balloons, whose borders and letters look like they were written with coal chalk — easily readable and, with the exception of the preacher when he’s preaching, not in your face.

That said, this style does hamper aspects of the comic. Shadows unnecessarily obscure features or feel unfinished, like the marker ran out of ink midway through, leaving small specks of the colors behind it to shine through. Characters, too, in more action oriented scenes, pose in ways that are off. Technically, there is nothing wrong with them but it’s the difference between watching an award winning actress play Lady Macbeth and a pretty good high school performance; both work but one is less crisp, less convincing in their body language.

But then the creative team pulls out a moment like Goon #2 getting hit on the side of the head by a can of hairspray and the set-up, pay-off and execution of the comedy couldn’t be more perfect. Both goons’ facial expressions are priceless and the small “thok” is expertly placed and not overpowering the action, complimenting it and establishing the severity, or lack thereof, of the injury. Pages like these show that the team, and especially Smith, know what they’re doing.

The clarity of the action and plot never suffers thanks to the attention to detail placed into each panel. There may not be much in the way of intricate detail in each panel but everything serves a purpose, be it the flapping, ripped tent sheets, the preacher hiding in the background, or the sheer insane number of trinkets Chuck has in her bag, her home, and her car. By stripping each panel down to the essentials, in order to convey place, personality and plot, we can better pay attention to the important aspects of each page.

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This allows Gwenn more room to establish who Chuck is via the dialogue without inundating us with details and backstory. That first page gave us all we needed to know to get the ball rolling and each new situation informs on, 1) how Chuck’s “powers” work and how aware she is of them and 2) her past, letting us do the work of assembling the picture. There is very little narration and what we get saves pages on undramatized scenes that would have only added fluff or is used to play off of the action & dialog in the scene.

A lot happens in this issue, and it beautifully sets up the major conflicts and character relations. I want to know more about her, her past, and her “powers” but, more importantly, I want to know what happens next. I am invested in knowing how the insurance investigator, the preacher, and the killer mother will all intersect. By the time we reach the final page, I can almost hear the frantic soundtrack ramping up, the snares and cymbals rattling, as our three major antagonists declare their intent, their silhouettes looming over the negative space that is Chuck and Fayola, tiny and obviously walking towards trouble, before it all comes to a crescendo and a cut to black.

Final Score: 8.0 – Held back by some of the art quirks that help establish the tone of the comic, “Bad Luck Chuck” #1 is a fantastic start to a funny, brisk new miniseries that, I believe, is only going to get better from here.


Elias Rosner

Elias is a lover of stories who, when he isn't writing reviews for Mulitversity, is hiding in the stacks of his library. Co-host of Make Mine Multiversity, a Marvel podcast, after winning the no-prize from the former hosts, co-editor of The Webcomics Weekly, and writer of the Worthy column, he can be found on Twitter (for mostly comics stuff) here and has finally updated his profile photo again.

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