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Jason McNamara, bon vivant and man about town, recently sent me the first issue of his latest comic, Phantom Limbs, which is a kind-of macabre anthology series. It’s drawn by Alberto Massaggia and designed by our old pal Sonia Harris, and I hope it does well for him, because Jason is a good dude and good writer, and we should all support good people who write good comics!

I don’t know if there’s a “theme” to these issues, but the name of the overall series seems to imply something, so I’m curious moving forward if one will appear. In this first issue, “The Thief,” we get Adrian, a top-of-the-line surgeon, whose abilities get stolen by a dude who only needs to touch you to take away your skills. Adrian, who isn’t exactly a total douchebag but isn’t the swellest guy either, doesn’t believe what the thief is telling him, but the thief proves it by showing him another person whose talents he stole — a demonstration that ends brutally. The thief wants 80% of everything Adrian has, and when Adrian pays, he gives the doctor his skills back. McNamara, who never met a downer ending that he didn’t love, gives us not one, but two! twist endings to the story, neither of which is happy. The second is fun, though, even though it’s a bit bleak, so there is that.

This is a cool, nasty little story, and it bodes well for the series as a whole (however many McNamara chooses to write). Jason has always done a nice job with regular people in tough situations, so Adrian feels like a regular dude, even though McNamara doesn’t spend as much time with him as he’s done with other characters in the past. We’re introduced to him flying his plane with his girlfriend, and it’s a nice little scene that shows that he’s a bit of a scamp but not irredeemable. The thief takes his powers, and we see Adrian fail to perform surgery, and McNamara does a good job showing his terror as he grasps that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. As his life unravels, we get a good sense of his powerlessness and his despair as he realizes the thief has done what he says he has done. He does this quickly, but he does it quite well, so as we follow along with Adrian, we get a good sense of him and what this all means to him. McNamara does let him get a good speech about what the thief is doing and why it sucks. It’s interesting that McNamara allows a slightly less-than-admirable character make excellent points about this kind of stealing, because he’s right, but because he doesn’t handle it all that well, we’re not completely on his side. It’s well done.

Massaggia does a marvelous job with the art, which is nice. One thing he does really well is color the book, as he uses mostly monochromes for various scenes. When Adrian is spending time with his girlfriend, Jodi, or doing things “outside” of work, we get a blue theme, which works well with some of the other color choices that we’ll get to. In the operating room, we get a green color, which implies sickness, either of the person on the table or of Adrian himself, as he loses his abilities. When Adrian is outside the hospital and meets the thief, Massaggia colors it a brownish-red, which implies the warm outdoors and a gritty desert — this is California, so that’s not the worst color to use to here. When Adrian meets the thief in a bar, we get a different hue of blue, sliding toward purple, which makes things darker — we’re in a bar, after all — without obscuring the line work. During this section, we get a lot of yellow, which Massaggia uses throughout the book to make things pop — yellow and purple and yellow and blue are complementary, so they don’t mix in the eye at all, making each seem brighter (which is why you see a blue-yellow combination so often on television). When the thief touches Adrian, we get a blaze of yellow highlighting the theft, and then when they’re in the bar, a yellow theme gradually invades the purple-blue, and it’s done very well — the yellow is more violent, which fits what’s happening in the scene, and it overshadows Adrian, who’s realizing that the thief does know what he’s doing. When Adrian concedes to the thief’s demands, the scene is real purple, which links it back to the bar scene. The violent yellow makes another few appearances, and Massaggia uses it really well. Finally, in the final scene, we get a different brownish-red — a bit on the orange side, as the thief is doing something else similar to what he did in the scene where he meets Adrian. Color-wise, the book is phenomenal.

Massaggia’s line art is excellent, too. He shows Adrian as a confident, strong dude, but when his skill leaves him, Massaggia does a good job with his eyes as he panics — he’s wearing a surgical mask, so his eyes are all we get. When he falls apart, Massaggia shows that he has stopped shaving and his hair has become bedraggled, and the way he reacts to his girlfriend and the way he reacts to the thief shows how he’s breaking down. The thief is nicely done, too, because Massaggia makes him just the slightest bit effeminate, which makes him lesser in the eyes of confident people like Adrian, so the contrast is nicely done, especially when Adrian has his speech about what a tool the thief is (and he is, it’s just that Adrian kind of is, too). The “action” scene in the middle of the issue is handled well, too, as Massaggia shows how violent things can get when someone lacks skills, and the choreography of the scene is really done nicely. Massaggia not only uses color well, but he uses white chunks (as well as more traditional spot blacks) to add definition to images, and he uses good jagged line work to imply motion while also judiciously dropping holding lines so the jagged lines don’t make the entire art too harsh. This works brilliantly on the last page, which is wickedly humorous and artistically thrilling.

I’ve liked most of what McNamara has done over the years, so take this review with a grain of salt. I try very hard to stay objective, and as Greg Hatcher used to say, if he didn’t like something that an indie comics creator sent to him, he simply wouldn’t review it, which is something I tend to adhere to, as well. So, I wrote about this, which must mean I really like it! Simple, right? It really is a keen issue, and it appears that Jason wants to keep this tone of slightly nasty things happening to people who may or may not deserve them. I’m still not completely sure where the title comes from (I mean, the thief gains a “phantom limb” of a sort while Adrian loses something that haunts him like a “phantom limb”), but if the stories are as good as this one, I don’t really care all that much!

The Kickstarter, which you can find here, is launching on Monday. You can go there now and get a notification when it launches, if this sounds like something you might dig. It’s a neat issue and a neat idea, so head on over to Kickstarter and check it out. You want to support good comics, don’t you?!?!?