“Days turn to sand, losing strength in every hand, they can’t hold you anymore”
David Lapham (along with his co-writer, Maria Lapham) is good at the sort of story we get in Good as Dead, which is from Image: he takes a bunch of rough-and-tumble, morally questionable characters, puts them in one setting, which is often constrained in some way, applies pressure, and turns them loose to see what happens. 
Mayhem is usually the answer, but Lapham is very good at that. Weirdly enough, this is “created by” Chris Black and David Alpert (Alpert is the CEO of Skydance, Kirkman’s imprint), so they must have decided that the Laphams, with their verve for chaos, would be good to bring this to life. Dee Cunniffe colors it, Nachie Marsham edits it, it’s $24.99, and it’s 240 pages of Lapham craziness.
Lapham (ok, the Laphams, but I’m just going to use the singular, if that’s all right with you) sets this in the town of Port Linden, which is on an island on the ‘Murican-Canadian border (I think the island is called Almont, but I’m not positive) — it’s in the States, but it’s clear that Lapham wants to make this a liminal place, where things are not quite set. Despite the presence of border guards, people move across the line rather freely, and it makes the authority of the sheriff and the FBI a bit weaker, which is the point. At the beginning of the book, a scientist drives onto the bridge connecting the two countries and sets himself on fire, and a few days later (I don’t think it’s the next day, but I could be wrong), the new bridge that’s supposed to take its place collapses, and it may or may not be sabotage. At the same time, Sheriff David Calhoun is poisoned, and he wants to figure out what’s going on before he dies, because it becomes pretty clear that there’s no cure. His deputy, Lenore, is trying to help him, but she has her own secrets, including the fact that she’s sleeping with the scion of the town’s oldest and crime-iest family, someone whom the sheriff would like to talk to because he’s convinced the family — the Valades — have something to do with the scientist’s suicide and the collapse of the bridge. 
Calhoun’s sister, Bobby, is a serious doomsday prepper, as she thinks aliens are coming to take over the world, and her hardcore attitude comes in handy as shit starts to hit the fan. Meanwhile, it appears the gub’mint might be doing some hinky things, because of course they are! Does it have anything to do with aliens that Bobby is worried about? With Lapham, you just never know. He’s wacky that way.
This is really Lapham’s bread-and-butter: he comes up with an interesting place and an interesting situation, gives us a bunch of compelling characters, and wreaks havoc. There’s a bit of weirdness, of course, as we get Bobby’s paranoia and what the government is doing and there’s an assassin with an unusual ability and the scientist is connected to other scientists who also start dying, so there’s something odd going on. Calhoun’s obsession with the crime family is nicely done, as we watch the sheriff deteriorate due to the poison but also because he really hates the Valades, and it possibly clouds his judgment with regard to them. As this is a nice, long book, Lapham can throw all this in there, and while it’s a bit convoluted, it’s never confusing, and Lapham does a nice job keeping track of everything. There’s a bit about the history of the town, there’s a bit about the natives in the area, and there’s the sudden violence that Lapham is always good at, and he always does a nice job introducing all sorts of ancillary stuff that becomes more and more important later on in unexpected ways. I know that a lot of writers do this, but Lapham is particularly good at it. He’s also good at making certain people and things seem important but they turn out to be not so much, and you just don’t know which is which. 
The Laphams have a lot of fun with the legerdemain, and it’s fun to read.
As always, Lapham’s art is very solid — he does that 2 x 4 grid almost exclusively, breaking it so rarely I do wonder why he bothered. His violent scenes are so visceral, and they leap up out of nowhere sometimes, and they’re always powerful and shocking. He always takes a lot of time creating the places where he sets his comics, so we get a nice sense of Port Linden and the surrounding areas, and he does a good job showing the differences between the classes and even the Americans and the Canadians. Lapham’s been doing this kind of thing for over 30 years, and he doesn’t really change too much, so you know what you’re going to get, and if you like it, you’ll like this. Cunniffe’s colors are a bit more subtle than some others’ who do Lapham’s art, as he uses nice shading and a good balance of earth tones and bolder hues, which keeps the pencil work from being too rough.
Good as Dead is another very good Lapham comic. The dude (and Maria) just knows how to make good comics, so — surprisingly — this is a good one. If you’re a fan of Lapham (and come on, you should be), this is something to check out.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
