It's been a while since we heard from Igor Kordey.  He's an excellent artist, but unfortunately best known in X-circles for his alarming fill-ins on New X-Men, and his acrimonious departure from Excalibur before the first issue had even hit the stands.

Which is a shame, because he's a great artist when he's given the right material and a sensible deadline.  On that level, at least, I was delighted to hear he was leaving Marvel, since it meant he was more likely to get both of them.  He's now at IDW doing the bookshelf-format miniseries Smoke, which is a much better use of his talents.

Writer Alex de Campi is an American living in London.  It's an unusual career path for comics, but at least it demonstrates excellent taste.  There's certainly a very British flavour to the script, and not merely because it's set in London.  It's a black comedy thriller, a genre which American publishers have never really gone overboard for, but which was the stock-in-trade of 2000AD. 

It's London in the relatively near future.  (Prince William is on the throne, and he's not that old.)  Rupert Cain, a black ops soldier who seems to be an albino for no particular reason other than aesthetics, is investigating the murder of his commanding officer.  This is fairly obviously going to lead him into a conspiracy which fills the other half of the plot, complete with schemes against OPEC - who hold all the cards because Britain has run out of oil reserves - and insane terrorist movements who want plastic surgery for all.

The thing with these stories is to allow the ridiculous elements to seep in without compromising the tension.  Smoke pulls that off, and so it works.  The Right to Beauty Brigade, a bunch of obese terrorists whose demands focus primarily on liposuction, are so absurd that they really shouldn't work in a story like this, but the creators keep the tone of the story on an even keel, and pull it off.  It helps, of course, that Kordey's art can make even the most unlikely world seem alive.

It's not perfect.  There are some overly obvious gags.  You can't really get away with having a supporting character called Jennie Bland who's an obvious knock-off of BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond, because the joke is simply too lame to sustain the repetition.  And the constant intercutting between scenes sometimes results in rather choppy pacing.

But it's ambitious, it looks great, and de Campi has enough of her own voice to escape the shadow of her influences.  Good stuff.

Rating: A

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