4 out of 5

Hitchiker’s gets all the love and references and curse any godforsaken person who asks about the number 42 with any glint of presumed cleverness behind their eyes.  Hitchiker’s is great, but don’t we wish we had more Dirk Gently?  There was a pretty fantastic BBC series a bit ago – and I’m glad to see that the comic has taken a bit of a visual lead with Dirk’s design from that – but otherwise its been quiet on the Gently front, while Guide forever floats on the peripherals of public awareness.  IDW did the needful with a series by Chris Ryall that was well received but skipped by yours truly, not being a Ryall fan.  Although, with IDW doing the double needful with this series, and an upcoming new TV show!, I feel a DG obsession a’fluttering, and I might need to go back and see how that first series shook out.

Arvind Ethan David is new to comics, and like a lot of noobs, there are minor hints here and there – inventive but cluttered pages, story asides and banter that aren’t quite paced for the comic world – but by and large the heart and soul of the comic are spot on, and this reads like Gently, so that goes a very, very long way in helping us to forgive those new-at-this signs.  Most impressively, ‘Spoon’ could be said to be an Agenda comic, with themes of conservation (tied to Douglas Adams’ own, and specifically to a Rhino preservation charity he helped found), and yet it never once preaches, and never feels wholly divided between story and agenda, while still directly speaking to its cause’s concerns.  That’s tough to do in any medium, and again, it seems to have been successfully navigated because of David’s perceived appreciation for the source material and its creator.  Rhino poaching – a problem due, ridiculously, to the pointless drug / fashion / bragging uses for rhino horns – is tied to another form of poaching in the series (a mystery which our Holistic Detective is hired to / holistically happens to investigate), and ‘A Spoon Too Short’ finds Dirk traveling to Africa to decipher elephant squiggles and eat seafood and solve things.

There’s a bit of a frame of a young Dirk, seemingly dreaming about his adult self, and I don’t recall that from the books at all, so we’ll suppose that’s a lead-in from series one.  Artist Ilias Kyriazis and colorist Charlie Kirchoff settle on an embellished Sunday Comics art style for this frame, with some very dream-like mazey layouts, so they remain visually interesting though rather separated from the main story, as do Dirk’s constant reminders to others that he has no special gifts.  This, again, seems to be a link to those frames, so perhaps David was saddled with the need to have that as part of his tale to build something in the IDW world, thus accounting for its somewhat disconnected application.

The main storyline is a hoot.  Certain people seem to have suddenly lost the ability to communicate – written, spoken – and Dirk follows leadless leads and clueless clues to get to the bottom of it.  Kyriazis and Kirchoff have a similarly exacerbated style here – saving most of the wacky stuff for Dirk and a ridiculous hairdo – but, besides some engaging splash images, the layouts are more traditional, though never boring.  David’s script gets the plot kicking from Gentlyness to Gentlyness, nailing the “interconnectedness” without feeling like he’s reaching in order to make his story work.  Like: complaining about yoghurt and traveling to Africa on a whim and looking inside a rhino’s nostril all feels like it very much makes sense within the context of Dirk’s existence.

While we do exist in a comic world that’s currently churning out reimaginations of old properties (and cashing in on the nostalgia) every other week, we’re also spoiled by these new versions being worked on by creators that seem to actually care about the subject matter.  ‘A Spoon Too Short’ reads like the third Gently novel we never got, and it’s exciting to think there’s more – hopefully of this quality – on this way.