You can put The Darkness up there with Spawn, Pitt, Witchblade and a whole lot of other 90s Image characters with stuff I just don't get. Despite Garth Ennis writing and Marc Silvestri on art, I never got into the book, and every time I picked it up and gave it a read, I found it to be pretty dull. So the return of The Darkness, even with such a solid creative team, didn't really stir much outside of a mild curiosity in me. Still, keeping an open mind, I read the first issue, but I found Jenkins's take on the mob scene to be remarkably silly and the horror overtones of the book not scary enough. Combine that with a character I don't much like and a story built on continuity from the past, and you've got a book that just doesn't ring my bell.
In all fairness, despite Jenkins tying this story into the previous tales of Jackie Estacado, he does keep the book accessible. The basics of his betrayal of his uncle and the subsequent murder of his (sort of) girlfriend are clear, and give us a pretty good idea of where Jackie is coming from. Unfortunately, I've always found Jackie to be a little cold and unemotional, and that's true here as well. His Uncle Frankie has done horrible things to him, and Frankie's cousin Paulie does something even worse this issue, and we never really get a sense of Jackie's anger. He responds to it in a vengeful fashion, but it's almost like a robot going through a programmed response.
While the character of Jackie bores me, though, the real problem I have with this issue is the mob politics. Granted, my knowledge comes from The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos, etc. but it sure seems like a guy who turned his uncle into the feds, no matter how much of a scumbag his uncle was, wouldn't dare show his face in the neighborhood again. And while Jackie hardly gets welcomed back with open arms, I found it hard to believe that he was greeted so warmly by the people he used to know.
It's been a while since Dale Keown has worked regularly in the comics industry. It's been even longer since he worked on a character that interested me. But whether he's working on The Hulk (which I liked) or Pitt (which I didn't), there's no denying that his artwork is beautiful. Keown puts a lot of detail into the background and does incredible character work, and the finale of the issue, a gunfight that turns into a charnal house, is just beautiful in its horrible detail. The lack of an inker makes me think the book is colored straight from his pencils, but if that's the case, my hat is off to Matt Milla, as he makes the art look clearer and brighter than most "digitally inked" books are.
The Darkness has never really been a concept that interested me, and despite a strong creative team, that hasn't really changed. A flat and uninteresting lead character and a ludicrous view of mob politics makes for a read that veers between boring and unbelievable, and the occasional flashes of horror, though visually stunning, don't really save the book for me.
