2 out of 5

An acceptable kick-off to a supernatural cop procedural – this is a genre, after all – gets thoroughly stymied by art / writing disconnects, some likely translation woes, and storytelling that’s in a rush to establish a world within five issues, likely for fear there wouldn’t be more. Still, there’s enough to like there, but indie publisher Ablaze’s editors allow for a pretty gross flub up front – the foreword is cut off – and the interviews in back remains untranslated from the original French. I wholly appreciate that translation is a privilege, but if you’re selling a book as translated…

Rhym is an Arabic woman, working for the French police. We join her and her crew on a drug bust in the underground subway; Rhym tracks a dealer while chattering with fellow police on her earpiece. When she’s spotted, an expected chase kicks off, but also something else: a man with whom the dealer was meeting throws blades of grass into the air before the pursuit. And while Rhym gives chase, the chatter in her earpiece – as well as those around her – belies a frightening reality: suddenly, no one else seems to remember who or where they are.

…Until a page later, when everyone’s like, “Well, that was weird. Rhym – you remember everything and we don,’t huh? Strange! Well, back to policing!”

Welcome to the bipolar pacing of Mathieu Gabella’s The Agent, which posits the existence of witchcraft in the modern day, formalized into something of a secret police running an org unbeknownst to more “official” channels. We next meet Sebastian, already inundated into this world, and introduced to readers through a scene comparable to the one above in its anticlimax. This also follows a previous scene of additional weird happening in France, and indicates a further ongoing issue with the book: while Fernando Dagnino has a nice, weighty Steve Epting style of noir-tinged panels, some disconnect occurred between artist and writer, leading our focus very astray during these scenes; in addition to the letterers at Vibrant Publishing Studio sometimes using odd word placement, or Dagnino not leaving a good spot for the text, or the translators not quite getting the flavor / pacing of a scene, or maybe Gabella just not great a moving us from scene to scene and delivering story context at the same time… It can be a wayward read.

Issue by issue, we piece together some massive plans on behalf of the grass-thrower, and the book settles into a better rhythm of introducing a new type of witchcraft and new baddie gambit, issue by issue. The disconnects remain, but there’s more flow to the story, up until too many things converge in the final chapter for these flawed approaches to manage; this is, at least, what one would’ve expected from the first issue’s problems, but it’s an unfortunate downturn form how things had kind of started to click.

Upon a light reread for review, understanding ahead of time that Gabella was essentially going to rush an entire origin story and world takeover plot into an introductory arc makes the read easier to go with; it looks like Gabella’s main work prior to this was a long-running historical series, and I can only imagine that a compressed fact-delivery style of writing is hard to transition to fiction.

There’s good stuff in The Agent, but it can be hard to dig out from the clunky presentation, and some somewhat amateur tics in the presentation from Ablaze, though perhaps that’s just in the digital copy I read.