Basic rules of the Vertigo imprint: if in doubt, revive an old character in almost unrecognisable form.

In Beware The Creeper, Jason Hall and Cliff Chiang take this to incredible lengths.  The Creeper was Steve Ditko's first creation for DC, debuting in Showcase #73 back in 1968.  Quite honestly, I've never paid much attention to the character.  Jones and Jacobs' The Comic Book Heroes describes him as "a hard-boiled journalist who terrifies criminals and police alike with a demonic yellow costume".

What any of that has to do with Beware the Creeper, I have absolutely no clue.  There's a vague similarity in the Creeper costume design, but aside from that it's pretty much a ground-up rethink.  It's Paris in 1925, and the Surrealist movement is in full flow.  The Creeper is... um...

Well, we'll come back to the Creeper.  The series actually focusses on identical twins Judith and Madeline Benoir.  Identical twins are always a source of confusion in visuals, which is presumably deliberate because it takes a couple of scenes before we see them together.  Judith is a surrealist painter, whereas Madeline is a more restrained playwright.

We don't get told all that much about Madeline's work, aside from the fact that it's largely about death (which Judith evidently considers a bit of a rut).  The focus is more on Judith, since Hall and Chiang seem much more interested in the underlying theory of surrealism.  As Judith helpfully explains, "it's all about the relationship between dreams and reality."  Judith's dreams evidently do have reality, since the Creeper - a woman who turns up at the end of this story - is patterned on one of her dreams.

That said, it's a dream committed to canvas, since Judith used it as the basis for a painting.  It doesn't take a genius to figure out the most likely candidate for the role at the end of the issue, given that the usual role of dual identities in the superhero genre is as a device for expressing different sides of the personality, and there wouldn't be a great deal of point in putting Judith in the costume.  Nonetheless, the Creeper evidently represents Judith's dreams penetrating reality, which presumably provides the basis for the surrealist themes in the story.

It's an intriguing start, and quite unusual in its attempt to relocate the superhero genre to such a wildly unlikely (yet strangely appropriate) setting.  Cliff Chiang's artwork is atmospheric, dense with panels and full of information.  He keeps the twins distinct, at least when he's called on to do so, and does some nicely staged scenes to keep characters in shadow without it being too contrived.

Strange, but definitely interesting.

Rating: A-

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