If the title doesn’t hook you, the creative team will. It’s not often you come across a combination as interesting as the writer of Veep and a mainstay of “2000 AD,” but there you have it. The difficulty, then, is managing expectations. Will this be satirical, with a psychedelic edge? Futuristic, with an improvisational air? Well, yes, actually, to all those things – and while it’s not perfect, this one-shot feels greater than the sum of its parts.
Written by David Quantick
Illustrated by Shaky KaneTWO COPS, ONE’S A ROBOT, ONLY THEY DON’T KNOW WHICH! BAFTA winner and writer on HBO’s award winning Veep, DAVID QUANTICK teams up with THE BULLETPROOF COFFIN’s SHAKY KANE on this migraine inducing Pop Art Cop-Buddy one-shot set in a near future Los Angeles. WARNING: Contains oversized patrol cars and perilous situations.
Without warning, buddy cops Matt and Jeff get the news that one of them is a robot. That’s enough to put anybody in an existential rut, but these guys turn it into a running joke – hence the title – and go about their crime-solving day.
Of course, these are no regular cops, and this is no ordinary Los Angeles. We’re seeing this through Shaky Kane goggles, which means that every page of the issue is a colourful gut-punch. It’s that recognizable mix of Silver Age faces and low-brow stylistics, and it really is an eyeful – especially since there’s so much in the way of kooky characters. Whether it’s a dude with an ant’s head or Frankenstein’s monster walking by, ogling the unusual denizens of this city is all kinds of fun.
The flatness of the colours – the absence of shading and gradient – keeps it all punchy. What with all the details, it gets kind of overwhelming; every billboard and bit of oddness in the background encourages you to make a second pass of the page.
Matt and Jeff, meanwhile, have got corny uniforms and regulation square jaws, but it’s all belied by their naturalistic dialogue. Which isn’t to say that the combination doesn’t work; it’s just interesting, not something you see very often. In any case, anyone who watches Veep knows that most of the show’s appeal is the harried back-and-forth between the characters, and we get a good deal of that in the opening scenes of this issue. The campy premise proves fertile ground for plenty of banter, and if there’s a flaw to be found on the writing level, it’s certainly not here.
The real trouble become apparent as the issue moves on: the structure is kind of odd. The robot predicament feels tacked-on to the investigation as hand – or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case, there’s a difficulty with pacing here; Matt and Jeff’s investigations seem to move forward without direction, spurred on by a hint that’s ignored at first and then rendered de trop by an explosion. It all looks great – nobody draws chaos like Shaky Kane, and there are all the swooping helicopters and crumbling skyscrapers you could ever want – but it’s all kind of difficult to invest in. By the last page of the issue, the horror of the premise feels very far away. It’s like the banter has minimized it so much that the gut-wrenching worry of it doesn’t get at you.
In the end, this doesn’t feel like a one-shot; it doesn’t hold together as a compressed capsule and doesn’t offer any final revelations. But if this issue is actually a dry run for a miniseries, it’s all we can do to hope that miniseries happens. Quantick and Kane might be an oil-and-water mix, but this collaboration makes for an unusual texture that could grow into something great if it had time to develop. In the mean time, this is an entertaining – if unusually-structured – jaunt; and if it doesn’t quite capitalize on its premise, the weirdness-to-page ratio is still through the roof.
Final Verdict: 7.9 – Strong browse
