On to this week's new series, and Top Cow are having another stab with The Darkness.  I managed to avoid this book altogether during its first run, by the simple device of avoiding everything Top Cow was producing in the nineties.

However, this relaunch is by Paul Jenkins and Dale Keown, which is a good creative team.  And so I'm giving it a look regardless.

Jackie Estacado, who apparently was dead at some point, is inexplicably back, and returns to his old neighbourhood.  This is a move of questionable wisdom, since last time he was there, he betrayed another member of his mob family to the police.  Consequently, not everyone is happy to see him back.

Although this builds heavily on what I take to be previous Darkness stories, nonetheless the story reads like a legitimate first issue, with the necessary information clearly present in the story.  Well, okay, I'm a little bit hazy about Jackie's second death, but he seems to be a bit confused about it as well, so I'm going to assume that's a deliberate plot point at this stage.  It's also a little unclear why Jackie is expecting any sort of favourable response having betrayed another mob member - he seems to suggest that this guy had left the family already, but we're not given much of the background.  In the circumstances, I'll take Jenkins' word for it.

The basic premise is that Jackie has vast hereditary powers, but only in the dark.  However, rather than have Jackie take advantage of this, Jenkins' angle is that Jackie is scared of his own powers, portrayed as monsters in the shadows, and desperately tries to avoid the darkness if at all possible.  It's a nice twist, and positions the series more as a crime/horror title than a superhero book.

The art seems to have been done by shooting direct from Dale Keown's pencils and using computer colouring over that, a technique which looks to be picking up popularity.  The results here are pretty good, as Keown's work is detailed without being scratchy.  I'm not too keen on the design for the lead character, though.  He looks a little too action-movie to fit with the feel of the book.

I'm not quite grabbed at this stage, but I'll give it another couple of issues to see where Jenkins is going with this.

Rating: B

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