1 out of 5

You learn how to draw, and spend some time nailing down a consistent style for yourself with which you’re satisfied.  You come up with some cool character designs, and maybe a cool character name like Carver.  You know the plot beats of your favorite genre; you can’t wait to tell your story.  So you take that style, use it with your designs to draw Carver, and lay it down atop those beats.  Trouble is, you’re not a great story-teller.

It’s tough being rough on Carver, because Chris Hunt’s notes in the back of the issues make it clear how much time has gone in to getting this project off the ground.  He does seem to have a bit of tunnel vision over the importance of his my-life-as-funneled-through-Carver’s tale, which has maybe blinded him to how little he’s given readers to be interested in within the first couple of issues.  A know-it-all, mysteriously hooded bad guy creates some good intrigue for the first issue, but then wayward handling (and lettering) of this character’s connection to Carver lets that tight plot thread loosen.  By the time of the second issue, we’re pitched a relationship between Carver and another character that – to Hunt – has a lot more relevance than it can have for readers, since we’ve been given so little context.  The story is confused if it wants to be puzzle pieces or a character piece; it opts for fracturing the tale into splinters to satisfy the former and then having very focused character interactions for the latter, but in both cases, there’s still not enough actual story being told to make it matter.

Then we can wrap back around to my initial smarmy analysis of how this came together: through a lot of surface application.  Hunt’s art isn’t bad by any means (a Paul Pope influence, the artist actually contributing a short in the first issue), but it doesn’t yet feel solid enough to come across as truly identifiable as his own.  It’s rough; it’s an early effort.  The writing isn’t particularly bad at any single point, it just feels hollow.  There’s a forest for the trees sensibility to the project, at least thus far.

And yeah, I haven’t made a comic.  I can’t possible appreciate the effort it takes, or the guts to put it out there to have it be pooed on by internet doofs like me.  But such, I suppose, is the gamble one takes, and the gamble I took by spending money on a couple of issues.  ‘Carver’ might’ve enticed you – as it did me – as being a spin on Parker-esque noir.  Hunt’s in the ballpark, but the two issues I chanced are all ballpark, without much beyond the promise of eventual payoffs to keep one reading.