Finally for this week, Sammy: Tourist Trap, a four-issue miniseries from Image Central.

It's a little odd for a first issue of a hitherto unpublished series to open with a "Story so far" page, especially when it refers back to a webcomic that isn't actually available to read at the moment.  Fortunately, however, you don't really need to know anything about that story - we pick things up with Sammy, a thief, having just stolen an artefact in Acapulco and preparing to meet up with his employer.  Granted, this means that the story gives the strange initial impression that we're reading a coda, but by the end of the issue it's clearer where we're heading.

The handover is basically used as a piece of set-up to introduce the character and then allow the plot to go off onto a rather unexpected tangent.  Sammy's a somewhat likeable career criminal and so you'd generally expect creator Azad to go for a heist story - which seems to have been the plot of the prelude.  But this series seems to be going off on an altogether different direction, having its lead fall foul of an urban legend halfway through issue #1.

I'm not going to reveal what the urban legend in question is - since it would pretty much blow the plot - but it's a nicely constructed scene that makes it about as credible as this sort of thing is ever going to be.  Azad's art has enough of a cartoon quality to avoid the idea being two grotesque, while still leaving it slightly unpleasant.  His storytelling's pretty good, although the character design for Sammy looks a little bit too young, I think - he seems to be written about five or ten years older than he looks.

An entertaining first issue, anyhow, and an ending that certainly leave me wondering where the hell the story goes from here.  Worth a look.

Rating: A-

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