An ethereal taxi service gives departed souls one last ride, one last wish, before they're taken on to their final reward. It's a fantastic high concept, and reminds me of some of the stuff I liked about Showtime's Dead Like Me. Unfortunately, a great high concept suffers under some fairly clumsy storytelling, and while the overall thrust of the story is clear, the specifics are more often than not hard or impossible to figure out. When every other page results in my having to flip back and forth and try and figure out what just happened, the story becomes more frustrating than engaging. A shame, because there are some great moments in this first issue of Styx Taxi. If only those moments had coalesced into a solid whole better.
This story follows three cabbies; the bitter Charon, the motherly and sweet Circe and the old hand of the group, Dom. Each of them gets a different ride (or two), and each ride has both its own story and gives further insight into the cab driver. In terms of structure, this is the strongest that Styx Taxi gets, because the generalities of the stories are pretty good. The innocence of a dead child's last request and the joy that it brings to Dom, the romantic last notion that Circe witnesses which reinforces her own good nature and Charon's last ride, linked strongly to what put him in service to the cab service in the first place, all of these are very good stories.
Where the story really lacks is in foundation. It's not until late in the game that we even learn how one of the cabbies was put into this role. We certainly never really learn the reason for this cab service, and the basics of how it works. There's a certain amount of deliberate mystery, given that Dispatch represents God, and so the cosmic realities of why the cab service gives people two hours, what role they play in the cosmology, etc. really isn't all that important. However, little things like the nature of the cabbies (are they ghosts inhabiting real cabbies?), the soul quota and even the nature of the deaths could certainly be made much clearer.
Much of the blame here must fall on Arambulo, whose artwork shows potential but has some really shaky layouts. He's being asked to convey some difficult things, such as the translation from ghost cabbie to real cabbie, and indeed the whole separation between spirit world and real world, and he's not really up to the task. It seems like he overextended himself, going for unusual panel layouts and parallel storytelling when a basic grid might have been a lot more clear. There's not a real good sense of time and place, and the result is that important flashbacks or key moments don't pop the way they should. Certainly, though, Goldman could have conveyed some of the key plot and character information much more clearly as well.
Styx Taxi is a disappointment not because it's a couple of new creators whose work doesn't quite hit the mark the way it should, but because it's such a great idea with a lackluster execution. The goals of Goldman's story are clear, including the heartwarming moments, the life lessons and the humor, but the weak structure makes these things appreciable in the abstract, rather than giving them the punch that they could have had.
