Best Read of 2013? “The Private Eye”
It is too easy to overlook this self-published, digital-only work by two great comic book creators.
That my favorite comic book of 2013 is by writer Brian K. Vaughan isn’t that much of a surprise to me. His previous works, Y The Last Man and Pride of Bagdad remain high on my all time lists.
That my favorite read—comic, blog, novel or otherwise—of the last 12 months was released as an online only, pay-what-you-want format, is.
The book in question is The Private Eye Vaughan and artist Marcos Martin, published at Panel Syndicate.
The Private Eye is a piece of pop sci-fi set two generations from now in a Los Angeles that could almost be mistaken for that of the movie Her with one big difference: there’s no Internet.
Which means that my favorite book of 2013 was released on the Internet and is about a world where there is no Internet. The irony is not lost in the story either.
The Private Eye is part of what feels like a wave of Neo-Noir sci-fi. On television we find Almost Human playing out tropes straight out of Blade Runner. Hell, not even tropes, they are lifting production design elements. While The Private Eye swims in the the same genre waters it owes more to Dashiell Hammett and Ross MacDonald than Ridley Scott. This is a world where the fourth estate has merged with the police apparatus and The Los Angeles Times is the arbiter of justice.
The star of the series is a character we only know as P.I.. He is a private investigator, a paparazzi in the parlance of Los Angeles 2076. As an unlicensed journalist he skates the edges of the law, regularly violating the one big rule of this future society: everyone’s privacy is sacrosanct.
That second difference between the world of The Private Eye and Her, or our own really is turned into the signature visual of the series. Nearly everyone of age in this society goes about their daily lives while wearing a mask.
In the realm of superhero comics the trope of secret identity is a well-worn shoe. So well-worn that there are holes sticking out all over the damn thing. To watch two creators who have worked in the superhero business mine the idea of secret identity for a commentary on the way that our lives are under a constant microscope is thrilling. That the creation of The Private Eye was underway before the National Security Agency revelations made by Edward Snowden gives the work a feeling of dark prophecy.
Which is exactly the kind of sci-fi I enjoy the most.
I came late to The Private Eye. I knew that it existed, but having an allergic aversion towards PayPal–-the method the authors have set up so they can get paid–-I found myself putting off the purchase. I could have just downloaded the work for free, but that goes against my principles. After all, if I like something I want to encourage creators to keep on making it.
Five issues of the series are extant and I devoured all of them in two sittings. From the high concept of a world where privacy is the greatest value, a richly detailed society is forged. The ideas themselves are so well-crafted that I am loath to go into detail on how the world is laid out.
Nor is this just an act of world building. Vaughan is in top form here. As much as I love Saga and continue to be amazed by how he makes the melding of world building and character driven action appear seamless there Vaughan is in even better form here. Perhaps it is the urgency of the thematic material that gives this book gravity that the delicious space opera of Saga cannot match.
Despite the fact that this is a Los Angeles peppered with brilliant public transportation options, and populated by background characters drawn from every genre of fiction imaginable, the action of the book is grounded. Clear character motivations are revealed through sharp plot mechanisms. Not a single beat is wasted and in the tradition of noir every twist feels like it comes at the end of a knife in the gut.
In short: it’s a fucking detective story in a world strange enough to be fascinating and familiar enough to be (almost)plausible.
What pains me is that because this is a digital-only release which is entirely self published there are vast numbers of comic book readers who must completely unaware this work exists. That’s a damn shame. Not only is Brian K. Vaughan writing at the top of his craft, but Marcos Martin is using the digital canvas to create a dynamic, cinematic work. While Martin doesn’t use any of the techniques you might find in comics published at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent, his layouts play wisely with the widescreen format.
For a story that is being read on tablet devices in landscape format, and set in the heart of Hollywood this melding of style and substance is only all the more appropriate.
Above of all else that’s what gets me about The Private Eye. The creators have matched story to platform in a way that I haven’t seen in any medium in a long while. That doesn’t mean no one has done it, it just means that our Internet-enabled media is so damn crowded I haven’t stumbled across such a narrative since the first BioShock.
The only real problem I have with The Private Eye is that it doesn’t come out every week.
The Private Eye can be found exclusively at PanelSyndicate.com
