I was a little let down by the first Call mini, which seemed to promise an over-arcing story I had little interest in across all three The Call stories. Happily, in the first issue of The Precinct, Jones and Mandrake play down the magic/apocalypse little girl and instead focus on two brothers, one a cop and one an ex-cop who has begun a priest. I wasn't completely sold on the reality of their respective careers, which are played as more action movie/TV stereotypes than reality-based, but I bought into the nature of their relationship and that is the foundation on which the series is built. In addition, Mandrake brings a darkness and reality to the series that really works with the story Jones is telling and even with the over-arcing supernatural story.
Jones has done very character-oriented work on Tangled Web and Incredible Hulk, and The Call is much the same. While the story is ostensibly about the day-to-day lives of policemen, it is really about one specific cop and his brother and how being cops has affected their lives. The friction between the two as a result of Joey's "betrayal of the badge" or Frank's trouble dealing with their father is completely believable. Jones's dialogue reads like the dialogue between two brothers, with just the right mixture of love, annoyance and trust.
Not quite so believable is the depiction of the jobs the two men do. When Frank stops a perp from getting away by throwing a conveniently placed steering wheel at his legs, I was reminded that I was reading a comic. Ditto for the showdown in the church, which even with Joey's history as a cop seemed a bit more action hero than priest. These aren't enough to ruin the story for me, and in fact I enjoyed them on their own, but they did make me roll my eyes, and they worked against the realism of the story.
Fortunately, the realism is reinforced on every page by Mandrake's artwork. Mandrake's figures are distinctively his, slightly blocky and defined with only a few lines, but they are remarkably expressive within his style. In addition, he is one of the best artists in the industry when it comes to shadows and realistic backdrops, which is part of what made him so well-suited to DC's The Spectre. His work on the supernatural was another big part, and he does some creepy stuff with fire and with the prophetic little girl in this issue as well.
Cop dramas are one of those perennial genres in TV and movies, but for some reason they are few and far between in comics. I wouldn't necessarily put The Call up against Homicide or Hill Street Blues, if only because the supernatural elements of the story seem a little forced, but I'm glad to see this tried and true genre getting a try from one of the big two publishers.
