4 out of 5

I don’t know exactly what brand of pulp we classify Bixby Grant as – supernatural pulp? Weird pulp? – but it’s a corner of the genre, specifically in comics, that I love: a classic horror or sci-fi icon as a detective. Vampire detectives; robot detectives; werewolf detectives; and with Bixby – immortal mummy detective. Better comic historians than me can trace this subgenre to its roots, and I’m sure its way earlier than Hellboy, but I feel like Mignola’s written- / drawn-by era of that book helped to carve out a set space for many variants of snarky B-movie types who use terms like “dames.”

But even as an admitted sucker of books of this variety (I’ll almost always give them a shot), they’re not easy to do well. You can’t just be snark and dames, and ideally there’s substance to whatever featured mystery as well. Patrick Coyle may’ve tossed up some easy indicators with giving a main character the last name of “Vulfenberg,” but even with that can’t-miss-it wink, “Wolf, She Cried!’s” nine parts are a great ride, and still have some story pieces to be put together that require Grant to do the detectivin’ procedural stuff – beats that are also often overlooked in this scene. And that winkiness is also surely part of the formula: Coyle has a lot of fun constantly referencing Bixby’s dead wife as the tragedy he can’t get past; and people have cell phones and computers, but Grant is willfuly stuck in the past, and prefers to ignore that stuff. While some of the early 9-panel grid of talking heads as Bix gathers clues feels a little shambly in execution – see also some runaround as we bounce back and forth between the same suspects – I’m more in favor of having this stuff (as part of those procedural beats) than skipping it, and I’d guess that future Grant installments can only get better at smoothing such sections out.

On art, Gonzalo Martinez’s streamlined, Darwyn Cooke-esque style and clean, Marcos Martin-like line manage a balance not common for indies in this scene: both the dialogue and action sequences read well. The acting is solid, and I appreciate how “noir” Gonzalo gets with certain angles and positioning; meanwhile, when the action happens, Martinez is willing to break out of the grid, and find the pacing that fits the scene. There was something a little odd with the faces, though, where characters felt a bit inconsistent panel to panel, like they’d been drawn weeks apart and the artist had decided to make them thinner or fatter, or their eyebrows a bit different.

Steve Wands on lettering was a great choice: the thin spacing on the bubbles with fairly wide tales matched the way I “heard” the dialogue, and I never once scrambled around over a confusing placement or sequence.

…And not to diminish either of those contributors, but the big star, to me, was Arthur Hesli on colors. The use of shadows throughout the book is masterful, whether full-black or grey, and Hesli manages to drop in a truly impressive palette that should be outside of the gumshoe-vibes, but is made to work by keeping the overall tone on moody blues and purples, and also avoiding too many pop colors – everything has a nice, grainy gradient.

In addition to the main tale – which concerns a missing husband, corporate espionage, and werewolves – we also get a short backup that fills in a bit of the “myth” of Bixby Grant, Private Eye.