Review time! with ‘The Voice Said Kill’

“Lead on big moon, I’ll cross that river — heat and darkness on the other side”

Si Spurrier and Vanesa del Ray, along with John Starr, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, and editor Eric Harburn, bring us The Voice Said Kill, which can’t be a fun-filled adventure, can it? This is from Image, it’s $16.99, and it’s 124 pages long.

I’ve liked plenty of Spurrier comics in the past, which is partly why I got this (the other part is del Ray’s art, which is ginchy), as it sounded like a keen thing — a park ranger in Louisiana gets caught up a crime drama. And she’s pregnant, so there’s that. At the beginning of this comic, Sergeant Marie Burgau is alone at her post because her co-workers have stayed home with a nasty case of food poisoning that they got at a picnic celebration the day before. Marie has a chat with a local moonshiner, whose son just got out of prison but has disappeared into the swamp and who wants Marie to keep an eye out for him. Marie gets a call, and she finds Buck — the son — in a swamp somewhere, but she can’t calm him down (he’s “off his meds”) and has to shoot him. She thinks she gets rid of the body, but then she gets a call about a murder on land that abuts the park, so she has to go over there. Oh dear.

It’s a pretty decent set-up, as Marie gets involved with a drug-smuggling gang who wants her to take them out into the swamp, so she has to figure out how to get out of that without dying or, you know, getting her unborn child killed. The food poisoning is, of course, part of the plot, and Spurrier uses it cleverly. Why the title, you wonder? Well, Marie is speaking to a dispatcher, who gives her advice, including … well, you know the title, so you can probably guess. It’s an odd conceit, but Spurrier does a good job with it, adding some nice twists and turns as Marie goes deeper into the swamp with a bunch of bad people. There’s nothing too shocking, but Spurrier is a good enough writer to keep things moving along nicely and keep things interesting. Making his protagonist a pregnant park ranger with not a lot of physical stamina (because of the pregnancy) and no real experience dealing with hardened criminals (because of the park ranger-ness) is clever because Marie has to outthink her antagonists, and she’s quite clever. There’s a good deal of violence, certainly, but Marie doesn’t need to go into any situation with guns blazing, because she can use her brain instead.

Del Ray does her usual impressionistic job with the art, which works really well for a story set in a swamp. She can go nuts with the vegetation, hiding Buck among the trees when Marie finds him, hiding alligators lurking in waterways that the criminals don’t see, and hiding Marie when she has to get away from her captors. Del Ray always uses harsh brushstrokes, which usually works with whatever she’s illustrating but works very well here, as she’s tasked to draw a riotous, dangerous world that has no time for frail humans. She does a very good job with Marie, making her both vulnerable (due to the pregnancy) and strong (possibly due to the pregnancy, but probably because she’s just tough) as she tries to figure out a way home. When del Ray gives us Marie in close-up, she uses slightly thinner lines to humanize her a bit, but she also does a nice job putting her in panels where the forest threatens to overwhelm her. She does a neat job breaking the panels up in some different ways — in one scene, it’s cigarette smoke, in another, it’s a chain link fence — and she knows when to make the panel borders a bit more jagged and chaotic, mirroring the story a bit. Starr’s green palette is terrific, too, as he gives us a lot of different shades of it, so things get messy and murky in the swamp, but the greens never get too dark. It’s a scratchy, raw work, but it works.

I don’t love The Voice Said Kill as much as I wanted to, mainly because, despite Spurrier doing some nice twists and turns, it does unfold almost exactly as you think it will. I don’t need shocks! and surprises! in everything I read, of course, but if Spurrier is going to write a crime drama with some surprises, he should try to make them better. Also, despite Marie being an interesting character, she’s a bit of a stereotype, as is everyone else in the story. Spurrier wants to do a plot-propelled drama, and more power to him, but it does feel a bit empty once you get through the plot. It’s not bad, and I enjoyed reading it, but it does feel a bit forgettable. Still, there’s nice art, and it’s a fun crime story. I just wish it had a little more meat on the bone, I guess.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆