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Stories intersect in the two parallel tales being told by Ram V and Dan Watters in the first issue of The Six Fingers. In Ram V’s The One Hand a detective noir story is established. We get a look into the character of Ari Nassar, a hard boiled detective thrown into a case he’s already solved twice. In Dan Watters The Six Fingers, we follow the story from the opposite perspective: the killer Detective Nassar is after. It’s a psychological “cat and mouse” tale with a few twists yet to come!
- Written by Dan Watters
- Art by Sumit Kumar
- Colors by Lee Loughridge
- Letters by Aditya Bidikar
- Edited by Will Dennis
***Slight Spoilers Ahead for The Six Fingers and The Other Hand***
The Six Fingers on The One Hand
In Ram V’s The One Hand, we get a dark Neo Noir tale in which a serial killer reappears and the detective’s that’s solved the case twice, Ari Nassar, has to postpone his retirement to figure out how this could be happening again.
Artist Laurence Campbell establishes the setting of the city of Neo Novena. It’s a great design with an interesting mix of time periods. It feels predominantly modern, with touches of the 50’s and cyberpunk elements. Everything in The One Hand is dark and gloomy. It feels cold and wet. Most of the story takes place at night.
The Psychology of The Six Fingers
In The Six Fingers, we get to see Neo Novena from another point of view. This time it’s from the perspective of Johannes Vale, Archaeology grad student. We learn a lot about Johannes in the first pages of the book. He’s passionate about the “Why?” of things. As he’s presenting to his professors, he is passionate about the unknown and romanticizes an unknown civilization via an arrowhead found by his father in a mine.
When Johannes realizes he’s missing the proposal he spent all night working on, we get to see an underlying rage to the character. This wouldn’t be the last time either. Johannes is constantly giving us peaks into his dark underlying personality. He treats synthetics or “Cogs” with disdain. He’s so hyper focused on his needs, that he is constantly zoning out, living on “cruise-control” so to speak. He’s disconnected from his relationship. In a heated exchange with his girlfriend it’s easy to see that’s controlling and manipulative.
It takes his girlfriend breaking up with him at rather grotesque art gallery featuring body horror to trigger something in him. He retraces his steps from the night before. It becomes clear to him that instead of staying up writing his proposal all night, like he thought, he had done something terrible.
The “Keys” To The Comic
The Six Fingers looks at Neo Novena from a brighter and more hopeful eye. The colors are brighter. The story takes takes place in more public places, such as a university, public transportation, a refinery, and an art gallery. Sumit Kumar brings a beautiful realism to this side of Neo Novena. It’s interesting that in a book following a killer, we get to see more people, more of the world, and the character of Johannes Vale is drawn with an innocence that strongly contrasts the way detective Ari Nassar is drawn in The One Hand.
The Colors on The Six Fingers
The colors provided by Lee Loughridge continue to impress as he and letterer Aditya Bidikar are the common links between The Six Fingers and The One Hand. I loved Lee’s play with lighting in The One Hand and it continues here. Of course there’s more light on these daytime and public scenes, making for brighter tones and more defined images. When Johannes begins to retrace his steps at night, the atmosphere from The One Hand returns.
Dan Watters Builds A Villain…?
Dan Watters builds the character of Johannes Vale with expert pacing. It’s a slow decent into the dark subconscious of the character. He knows how to get Vale really close to being sympathetic, without crossing that line completely. He wants us to see the thought process and patterns of a sociopath, making him relatable in ways, but still confirming that the guy has issues.
Everything Points to 8.5/10
I enjoyed this comic and I really like the idea of seeing the story develop from the other side of the coin. Dan Watters gets us into the mind of a serial killer without giving us everything in the first issue. Sumit Kumar’s art pulls me into the world he’s building, and helps build character by making Johannes seem almost different in a way from everyone else. I did enjoy The One Hand more, but that’s a person bias there. I really loved the dark Neo Noir feel of that book, whereas The Six Fingers has a lot less of that. All that said, the idea of reading a story from a killer and the detective trying to catch him makes both of these books worth picking up!
