4 out of 5

Cabdriver Cyrus picks up a wounded teenager who dies in his cab while Cyrus is trying to get him to the hospital.  Reasonably affected by the event, Cyrus takes some time off, only to return to work to find that the teen lives on… as a ghost, stuck to his cab, and only visible / audible to our cabbie.  So obviously the only thing to do is figure out what happened prior to picking the kid up.

Perkins is a nearly perfect slice of mystery-lite plus the supernatural, the kind of bread-and-butter “of the week” episodes that were generally satisfying on the X-Files, or Fringe, and that we’re often robbed off when television media drifts more toward seasonal arcs or comics go for interconnectedness-of-all-books approaches.  Not everything has to be the end of the world or solve all the mysteries, and/or media can sometimes be better by just trying to be fun.  Dwonch seems to embrace this with Perkins, but paces things wonderfully such that our lead feels fully humanized as he gets wrapped up in the ghost biz.  There’s a questionable moment at the end of the second issue where Dwonch worrisomely portends that Perkins needs to get some kind of moral lesson out of this, but thankfully the story seems to proceed without being derailed into any eye-rolling exposition that imparts “meaning” unnecessarily.

Not all is perfect with the story, though: without giving too much away, the final explanation is fun, but seems to dole out its justice a bit unfairly, and certain character’s leaps from mischievous to murderous seems a bit too convenient.  But this is only really evident when you think about it too much; Dwonch’s writing is smooth enough to carry the reader past it without much turbulence.  Also assisting in keeping things flowing – in a way that sort of snuck up on me – is Anna Lencioni’s art.  She has a sort of simplistic style, her figures reminding me of slightly more 3D variants of INJ Culbard’s Brass Sun stuff – with backgrounds and props sketched in rather loosely, but there’s a splash page in issue 4 that gives us a money shot of a monster, and I was struck by how effectively creepy it was, and how scary is generally impossible to pull off with the cartoonish look Lencioni effects.  I sat on that panel for a while, then started flipping back through the issues, and got to appreciate how casually Anna’s layouts and characterizations had accomplished making the story engaging; not a page felt wasted or uninteresting.

We’re promised more Perkins, which is great.  There are the usual over-arching curiosities sprinkled in that Dwonch will hopefully keep in the background so we can have some more bread-and-butter; that stuff is the foundation because… it’s the foundation.  We can rely on it.  But regardless of how that turns out for future Perkins tales, The Haunted Taxi Cab is a great introduction, and a super fun standalone story.