A Review of Wiper

Wiper

John Harris Dunning words
Ricardo Cabral art
Brad Simpson colors
Jim Campbell letters
From Dark Horse

Stuck on a project? Having trouble with the past? Feeling like a fresh dry-erase board? Peep this solicit:

Lula Nomi is a Wiper-a private detective who guarantees complete discretion. A memory wipe after every job sees to that. When she's hired by enigmatic robot Klute she thinks the case is the answer to all her problems. But there's something oddly familiar about Klute-and the more she investigates the disappearance of journalist Orson Glark, the more she suspects that he's somehow connected to her own past . . .

Lula must face her greatest fears to learn what happened to Glark . . . and the truth about herself.

Sci-fi noir is an important clash of genres that works incredibly well together; however, they’re harder to pull off. Both genres require an anchoring point to remind the audience of what it is to be human, but they must also allow the audience to drift a bit, to separate themselves from that humanness so that the narrative events can bring them back to that anchoring point later in the game. The hopelessness and inevitability of great noir must clash, and simultaneously strengthen, the alienness of great science fiction. 

Guess what? Wiper succeeds in all of this.

Wiper is dropping, smack-dab, in the middle of Noirvember, and it’s bringing the best noir vibes to the shelves of your local comic shop. It’s like Rick Deckard from Blade Runner went hunting for Ethan Reckless from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Reckless series. In this mystical comparison narrative, Rick can’t figure out if Ethan is a replicant or not, and they end up finding each other tolerable and go on wild adventures together.

Yes, Wiper is just like that but with more nuance. Plus, aliens. It has aliens. Lots of them.

John Harris Dunning’s script is incredibly modern and untamed. Dunning isn’t afraid to take his characters into the bowels of civilization. He’s found a darkness in space, a narrative cavern so inhospitable that the protagonist must be memory wiped to keep the plot safe from its readers. Déjà vu becomes a danger, and as the story progresses, Lula’s intuition peels away at Wiper’s unglued wallpaper. None of us are ready for the unveiled decor.

“ . . . we’ve all done something to deserve our fates, even if we don’t know what.”

The tension is astounding. The dialog is curt but effective. There’s also an entirely new realm to the unreliable narrator trope. Lula’s mind is altered. At times, she might be hallucinating. The visual and the textual components come together to keep readers disjointed and guessing. We’re kept in dark tunnels with outstretched hands. Our fingers extend to their limits trying to find anything tangible. No matter our tactics, Dunning’s script keeps us powerless to anything other than turning the page. 

We are, at all times, prisoner to the narrative’s whims, and I fucking love it! Not only is the writing stellar, but the art is good enough to melt your corneas as if staring into a solar eclipse.

The opening splash page is, literally, the most explosive thing I’ve witnessed in a comic book. I’ve never seen a nuclear detonation look so incredibly beautiful. The blast wave ripples outside of the realms of the comic causing your hands to shudder as you try to keep the book open. The eye of the explosion stares into you and holds your gaze. It’s interesting, the destructive force of which this comic begins, yet following that first page, it’s all about building this new science fiction world full of wonder and danger.

Ricardo Cabral is a goddamned master with the pencil. The linework in Wiper is nothing short of incredible. It’s rich in detail and intimately varied on every page. The scene changes from Earth, to the Hive, to Tentacle Town are labored and heterogenous. The amount of characters, and their abhumanness, we see on every page is staggering. Cabral puts in serious work to build this futuristic world, and the payoff is sublime.

Brad Simpson shows himself to be at high rungs of the comic book coloring ladder. His palette goes from beachside warm to winter cool at the flick of a magic wand. This book is bright. It’s unafraid to show you its secrets. Even in the dark corners, this art team has nothing to hide. Yes, I fell in love with this story, but I cannot pretend I didn’t shallowly succumb to its beauty first, and that includes the pristine lettering by Jim Campbell.

This is great noir. This is phenomenal science fiction. This is genre fiction excellence with nothing to critique. It’s a comic book wonder, and it’s coming to you all at once in an original graphic novel format. The only thing you need to wait for is how long it takes you to turn the pages.

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And now for some current Buzzenings…

I’m on TikTok! You can find me at @blakesbuzz and I’ve been posting video/audio reviews and snippets from interviews. Go follow me!

Blake’s Buzz Live Episode 31 is happening tomorrow, 11/16, at 9PM CST! I’ve got some wonderfully talented creatives with some wonderfully awesome comics that are definitely worth your attention. Click here to set a reminder and watch the show when it goes live!

If you haven’t listened yet, the latest podcast episode features Ron Marz, Darryl Banks, Keith Champagne, and Michael Katz! They all stopped by to talk about the new Riot Earp Special live on Kickstarter. You can download Blake’s Buzz anywhere and everywhere, and you can check out the Riot Earp campaign page here. I also uploaded the video chat to the YouTube channel. It’s got a few extra minutes of content, and you can find it here.

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Finally, a friend of Blake’s Buzz has a really great Kickstarter going that needs a little help. Matta Sorcier’s Sacrimony 1-5 has just over 2 days left, and it’s a gorgeous comic that deserves to be on your shelf. Some have compared it to Saga. It’s a really great story with wonderful characters, and she’s got some awesome variants and bonus goodies if that’s your jam! Click here to check it out!