2 out of 5

In the back pages of Veil #1, Greg admits he sat on the story for a bit because it frightened him.  At a very, very high level – a strong female lead – that might seem odd as Rucka habitually writes strong female leads, and so what is there to be frightened of? …but that high level question is as ignorant as it sounds.  Certainly you can be a crime writer who always writes tales of drunken P.I.’s with mysterious pasts, but the way in which you build up the world around the character can lead to endless possibilities.  And so it goes with Veil, which is very different from what modern-day Greg offers us.  In fact – thought not in terms of genre, of course – this very much reminds me of ‘Keeper,’ Greg’s first Atticus Kodiak prose novel, in that there’s really not too much to latch on to except faith that there will be.  But ‘Keeper’ had the benefit of having a few hundred pages to flesh out its lead and story; ‘Veil’ is is a comic, which generally either works shorthand – by having us fill-in-the-blanks based on the style of the writing – or longhand, filling-in-the-blanks over the course of months.  This is where much of the difference comes in when comparing the majority of Greg’s more recent output, as ‘Stumptown’ and ‘Lazarus’ can work with Rucka’s slowburn style as we’re more aware of our noir / sci-fi surroundings, even when in the latter case, there’s still much world-building to be done.  But Greg hasn’t done much horror (maybe a couple of shorts in anthology style books, to my recollection), and so that’s why I return to the ‘Keeper’ reference – ‘Keeper’ was filled with cliches and a very light-weight version of Atticus Kodiak; Greg had his talent for setting a scene, which greatly helped to keep the book churning, but I wonder if I would’ve continued with the series if I wasn’t already interested in Greg’s comics… and knew that there were several more Kodiak books over which he would hone his style (…and most certainly did.).

In ‘Veil,’ a girl wakes up naked and disoriented in an unused portion of the subway, covered in rats.  She wanders out to the street and is skirted to safety by Dante, who starts calling her Veil, then clothes her, feeds her, and witnesses her use some type of mental powers to kill some people.  Neat.  Meanwhile, some shadowy gangster types and a cool shirtless dude are involved in some ritualistic magic stuff, presumably with the goal of finding Veil.  Who is she? and Why is she being hunted? are mostly answered in what I assume is the first arc of hopefully more, but – as was the case with the first Lazarus arc – this is just Greg setting the scene.  He was right to be scared, because it’s clear he’s not sure of his in-point to a horror story.  He chooses an interested method of compositing relevant images in a 3×3 grid to establish tone, and this absolutely works, but even from the first issue I didn’t quite feel grabbed by anyone’s plight.  Rucka admits in a later letters’ page that he’s not out to trick anyone with the reveals, and that’s very much a part of my low rating: this is a horror-tinged mystery that’s currently lacking in a feeling of mystery.

Thankfully, there are two additions that make this a readable journey:

1. Greg’s established.  Hopefully ‘Veil’ nets enough sales that he can give us at least a few more stories to feel this out, because I know he can make this world and these characters just as strong as his other original creations.  Greg’s also lost like 95% of his cheesier dialogue moves, so while ‘Whiteout’ (his first comic) and those early Kodiak books sometimes have characters saying things that feel a bit forced, ‘Veil’ does have a very natural flow, and Greg is smartly leaning on saying less over more, so silence is smartly applied.

2. Artist Toni Fejzula.  Toni uses a very expressive ‘camera’ for his framing, adding in the sense of horror that Greg’s straight-forward writing approach may not necessarily sell.  We get dramatic angles when the action peaks, or wonderfully quirkily chopped close-ups while characters are emoting.  The shadows are simply blissfully gothic – angled blotches of shadows dotting every surface – and the colors (Toni and Aljosa Tomic) are this stunning blend of evil pastels, like a toned down version of Brendan McCarthy, but suited to the genre.

So it reads fine and looks great.  It’s also got a valid setup.  But it’s a pretty empty vessel at this point, though one I’m looking forward to seeing filled up.