How do you solve a mystery like how to make a murder mystery fresh again? At first glance, John Arcudi and Toni Fejzula’s “Dead Inside” #1 seems to be answering that by placing the murder inside the confines of a prison. However, this issue has much, much more going on than simply that.
Read on below for our full review of “Dead Inside” #1 to find out why this is going to be one of the most underrated best issues of the year.
Written by John Arcudi
Illustrated by Toni Fejzula
Murder behind bars!The Jail Crimes Division of the Sheriff’s Office in Mariposa County investigates crimes committed inside county jails. With a limited number of suspects who can’t escape, these are usually easy cases to solve—but not this one. As Detective Linda Caruso gets closer to the heart of the case, she discovers uncomfortable truths about her friends, her job, and herself.
On the laundry list of media that heavily influences modern takes on the crime and noir genres in comics, one that doesn’t come up very often is Columbo. The beauty of Columbo is that pretty much every episode of the show reveals the full circumstances of the murder and who committed it to the audience, leaving the tension to come from figuring out how Columbo will identify and catch the killer. It’s a unique subversion on how crime stories are generally told and not one that many other stories can pull off. What John Arcudi and Toni Fejzula have done with this first issue of “Dead Inside” #1 is something similar, with just enough of a twist of its own to really feel unique among crime stories.
The hook of “Dead Inside” #1 isn’t the mystery surrounding who committed the murder, or even the why. The who is shown in the opening pages and the why, being a murder committed in prison, is something most characters gloss over. The hook of the issue is Detective Caruso’s investigation continually being undermined by other detectives and what this means for the murder itself. This first issue plants a lot of seeds as to what could be operating in the shadows, beyond the perspective of the main character, that Arcudi’s script doesn’t call too much attention to. It could very easily be played off as inter-departmental politics in later issues, but there’s a sense of dread distilled in Arcudi’s script that speaks to unseen forces at play that makes a simple murder investigation even more compelling.
On top of that is the look at the personal life of Detective Caruso. Arcudi does something interesting in the scripting here as we’re given the notion that Caruso’s life has fallen to pieces without giving precise details as to how. There are references of some kind of event that put her on a path towards being the kind of detective who barely shows up for work, who gets put upon by everyone she works with, whose personal life is falling apart, but we only see the fallout in this issue. It’s interesting because it makes Caruso into as much of a mystery as the case she is trying to solve. While the circumstances of the murder are laid out plain for the reader, the circumstances of the dissolution of Caruso’s life is the mystery that the readers are trying to piece together.
As much as the title refers to the crime being committed within a prison, it refers to the state we find Caruso in.
While Arcudi’s script is tight and engaging and a smart example of how to find a new angle to tell a crime story, Toni Fejzula is a revelation of an artist for this kind of story. Fejzula’s artwork was incredibly impressive in “Veil”, a dark supernatural horror story he did with Greg Rucka, but I was interested in how his art would work with a much more subdued story like this. Turns out, it works amazingly. Fejzula channels those horror elements again in the opening pages, opening on a series of gruesome extreme closeups before pulling pack to show the full extent of the carnage of the murder in unflinching detail.
Continued belowFrom there, the story does become much more subdued. It’s a crime story so the rest of the issue becomes a series of dialogue scenes that Fejzula handles the storytelling on superbly. A lot of that comes down to the character he infuses in the characters of the story. Fejzula brings a lot of detail into his linework, heavily shading details like the rumples of fabric of a prion guard uniform or the wrinkles of the wardens face or the hatching in the shadows on the walls. There’s a strange grittiness and realness that comes from how detailed the shadows are that doesn’t compromise the storytelling or how clean the linework on the characters is otherwise.
It’s a haunting style the sets the reader on edge from page one and largely contributes to the feeling of dread inherent to Arcudi’s script. This is aided by the colours from Andre May. The colour palette of “Dead Inside” #1 is largely, as you’re expect pretty cold. Most of the issue is draped in these hues of steely blues, washed out greens and just depressing purples. So much of the colour of this issue is set to emphasise the way the world seems to be weighing down on Detective Caruso. As she continually has to force herself forward through the day, the colour palette gets more and more muted and cold, washing out what little muted oranges and yellows were present in the beginning of the issue.
The only pure warm colour in the entire issue is the vibrant, sickeningly red blood. The first page of this issue is a masterpiece in showing the brutality of violence through colour. The red is this warm, orange-y red that almost seems to capture the warmth of the arterial spray as it coats the panel while the details of the characters like the close-up of an eye and a mouth is depicted in this similarly vibrant, but really sickly and cold green with deep blues in the shadows. Even though a turn of the page shows the aftermath of the murder in an unflinching wide shot, that first page shows the act in six precise, extreme close ups that only hints that the actual violence and makes it all the more shocking through perfect use of storytelling through colour.
“Dead Inside” #1 is a shockingly solid first issue. Even though John Arcudi is a noted master of comic writing and Toni Fejzula impressed immensely with his work on “Veil”, I couldn’t help but be cynical as to how these two would find a new way of making a crime story interesting. Well, by gum, they did it. By focusing not on the mystery of the murder, but the investigation and throwing the issue’s twist and turns in Caruso’s attempts to follow through with her examination, the focus is on Caruso more than the murder itself. This allows Arcudi and Fejzula to make the real mystery of the story be the unravelling of Caruso’s life to make for a fantastic hook for a crime comic.
Final Verdict: 9.4 – At the last possible second, Arcudi and Fejzula came out with one of the strongest debuts of the year that I hope won’t fly under the radar.
