4 out of 5

Velvet #1 is not only an amazing first issue, it’s probably also one of the best floppies Ed has written to date, satisfying character and story and action requirements with just the right dash of verbosity and flair.  Steve Epting and Ellie Bretweister’s colors make their marks from the opening scenes of a secret agent jumping from building to building, from escapade to escapade, the hazy coolness of an interior scene cutting to purple skies to a lonely moonlit street, every gesture and shade feeling real and super-real at the same time.  Steve exists on the realist side of the comic world, but followed the Butch Guise school of excessive shadowing to give us mood, giving some of his books – like his run on Cap with Ed – a very murky look.  Even though much of ‘Velvet’ takes place in the shadows, his art is super clean here, maintaining his usual stoic and gruff figures but expertly dropping blacks onto only select portions of the page.  Whatever meetings take / have taken place to settle on the art style, every panel is in line with the 70s espionage vibe, without it ever feeling too kitschy.   Perhaps since finding an outlet for his darkest noir demons with ‘Fatale,’ Mr. Brubaker can return to his classic days of writing story and character over style; letting the spy setting inform the tale, but making sure that Velvet Templeton’s adventures will come first and foremost.  We open with Velvet as a secretary, maybe dropping some minor hints about a past exciting life, but otherwise trying to follow up on some minor details concerning a recent agent’s – of the ‘for your eyes only’ level of secrecy Arc-7 group – death.  Her superiors are oddly dismissive, and the man fingered for the killing is, to Velvet, incredibly unlikely to have done it.  So she tracks him down.  …And he’s been killed as well, and the frame-up is on, Arc-7 now after Velvet for committing both crimes.  We understand we’re going to get to some female heroics soon enough, but watching the 40ish, silver-streaked-haired Velvet karate chop her way through a room of heavies and then jump out of a top-story window to use her ‘stealth suit’ to glide elsewhere… Well.  It’s an amazing final panel of issue #1.

And Ed truly just keeps it cranked up from there.

Mostly.  While I love how rich the narration feels versus what I’d call the more ‘surface’ writing of recent Fatale (and Ed’s last few years of Criminal books), stretching waaay back to Scene of the Crime, Brubes sometimes has trouble with over-complicating his narrator’s backstory.  Issue #5 is incredibly clunky in trying to jump 18 years back to give us some history on Velvet, choosing a first-person present narrative for both the flashback and original 70s setting.  I’m not new to comics, by any means, and I had to flip back through the pages several times to verify I was following the timeline correctly.  Considering I doubt that confusion was his goal, it makes the end of the first arc of ‘Velvet’ like running into a brick wall, considering the breakneck pace of parts one through four.  The details are still interesting, but the execution and timing of it (it was a bit early for a full issue flashback, I felt) keep our first storyline from feeling perfect.  But four issues out of five are pretty damn awesome, and that makes it easy to know how to rate this as well…