Devil's Due, along with another outfit named Visible Light, offers up its own take on Marvel's Werewolf By Night with this well-illustrated but lightly plotted first issue. The concept is simple but has great potential, especially given the subplot revealed on the final page. But the star of this particular show is the art. This may be a black-and-white comic, but artist Nick Marinkovich uses that to his advantage. This is a haunting debut issue that draws the reader in somewhat, but only in the latter pages, when the story doesn't come off as quite so cliched in tone. Part horror comic, part super-hero formula, Antczak and Marinkovich merit some attention for the seeds they've planted here, and I look forward to how they'll tend to this dark, creepy garden in future issues.
Years ago, Davey Doyle learned he was a werewolf, a feral beast with a taste for blood, and he knew there was innocent blood on his hands (and fangs). He swore he'd pay a penance for the lives he'd taken, and that's when he became Nightwolf. Dedicating himself to unleashing his animalistic persona only on the wicked, he is joined by his friends, Shannon and Kip, in his mission of mayhem in Quad City's underworld. But Davey has made a terrible mistake, drawing the attention of the city's police force and politicians.
Marinkovich's art here reminds me a great deal of the style of Tony (Starman, Ex Machina) Harris. There's a photorealistic quality to the art, and it's easy to see that the artist sometimes incorporates photo references of real people to arrive at distinct looks for certain characters. The mayor of Quad City, for example, clearly evokes memories of Marlon Brando. Ink washes are employed to add texture, depth and atmosphere to the visuals as well. The action sequences are made up of flashes of darkness, which is something of a cheat but is in keeping with the dark, gothic tone of the property.
I enjoyed the notion that a monster has a couple of friends chasing him around the city, waiting to scoop him up and keep him from doing harm to anyone but the bad guys. It's like seeing Rick Jones chasing the Hulk around with a portable containment cave (check your Silver Age Hulk comics for the reference). I especially appreciated the love triangle dynamic that emerges by the issue's end. While Kip and Shannon's circumstances may be unimaginable, how they react to them and deal with them are credible. That emotional, human quality in turn lends that credibility to the incredible premise.
The setup at the beginning of the issue is more than a little cliched, and it's not at all clear how Davey arranges to control the monster within to mete out vengeance and justice rather than to feed on whatever flesh is handy. The pimp character introduced on the first page is a walking stereotype, and the unfortunate development of a dirty cop happening by doesn't represent the freshest cut of plotmeat I've ever seen. But there's definitely some promise shown in the efforts of these new names, and I suspect we'll see them working on higher profile projects in the future. 6/10
