Potter's Field [Hardcover]

Crime stories have arrived in comics in a big way. Back when comics were first starting, policeman and detectives featured as heroes were the order of the day. Until people (some of them policemen and detectives) started putting on colorful costumes and fighting criminals with fancy gadgets or superpowers. Then guys like Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka and Mark Millar figured out ways to reinvent crime comics. The comics world hasn't been the same since.

Mark Waid has evidently decided to throw his hat into the crime comics ring. As editor of Boom! Comics, he's evidently hired himself to write a couple of crime comics series, Potter's Field and The Unknown. He was also the writer behind Ruse, CrossGen Comics' homage to Sherlock Holmes. Waid definitely knows his way around a crime story, and how to string the read along on an investigation.

I liked the premise behind Potter's Field: an unknown hero simply called John Doe (which is what unidentified murder victims are called by the police) who dedicates himself to finding out who those unknown fallen are and bringing their killers to justice. Not only that, John Doe doesn't operate alone, he has a host of agents that he asks into his circle of associates, or gets them indebted to him, or blackmails into helping him.

I was immediately reminded of the old Shadow pulps, because that's exactly what that mysterious hero did for many years as well. It's a formula that works for readers.

I also liked Paul Azaceta's art on the pages. The panels are dark and moody, never far removed from danger and oblivion, and the violence is sharp and edge, often right in the reader's face. Azaceta delivers a compact, brutal look that's definitely attention-getting.

The mysteries in the first three stories are woven together well. There are lots of twists and turns for readers the like to puzzle out who the villains are. However, I did get lost during the final reveal to the overall mystery and had to go back to reread some of the previous pages. It all makes sense, but it comes together so suddenly that I couldn't quite comprehend everything on the first read-through.

John Doe, as I said, reminds me of the Shadow. But one of the things that made that old pulp character work so well were the agents. Harry Vincent was one of the Shadow's favorite agents and readers often got to view large sections of those stories through Harry's eyes. We got to know more about Harry, and we worried about him because the Shadow also lost agents throughout the series.

These stories center on John Doe, and I just didn't get enough of the character to truly lock into him. I want to know more about who he is and why he pursues his chosen career so zealously. I want to know why he has no fingerprints and how he stays so much in the dark.

I don't know if Waid is going to return to the character at some later date or if this is all there will be. If this is it, I have to admit to some dissatisfaction because the greatest reveal in the series is John Doe himself - and we don't get to watch that mystery get solved.

Reason for Reading: I've become a fan of Mark Waid.

John Doe is a mysterious vigilante who fights to name the unnamed in Potter's Field, a graveyard in New York City where the unidentified bodies are buried. He has an underground network of agents working for him from coroners to street people and he'll never give up until he's chiseled a name on a gravestone. John himself is just as mysterious as those he tries to help. No one knows his real name, where he comes from, his background or why he does this; the man doesn't even have any fingerprints!

This bind-up consists of the original three-volume mini series and a one shot issue plus a script & sketches for an unpublished story. The book also begins with an introduction by Greg Rucka and ends with a few pages of character sketches of John Doe by the artist. This is also a very attractive hardcover book with a matte finish dust jacket and an attached ribbon bookmark; when the jacket is removed the plain black boards reveals "JOHN DOE" etched on the front as if on a cemetery plaque.

A fabulous read! Compared in the introduction to Raymond Chandler this is classic crime noir set in the modern world. All together from the four issues we get three separate episodic stories. These are dark, gritty, nighttime tales of a guy walking into a bar looking for someone and creeping into dark hallways with a flashlight. Quite a lot of violence, but though everyone carries guns they are more likely to hit someone across the head with it than shoot them. The violence is more physical, punching, clobbering with foreign objects, heads in toilets, face on a hot grill, and so on. I really enjoyed the stories which each was very different from the other; the first involved a missing girl, the next was mob related and the last was cops gone bad. Great action-packed story telling. The artwork is also suitably matched, very dark and urban. I really enjoyed this and will be looking for further crime graphic novels as well as continuing to read Mark Waid.

This graphic novel is a very telling example of the good idea which is well executed at first, but which ultimately fails for other reasons. "Potter's Field" is the traditional name for the burial place to which paupers and unknown persons are consigned by local government. In New York City, it's located on Hart's Island and is haunted by a mysterious man known as John Doe, whose passion is identifying the anonymous bodies and chiseling their names on their case-number-only grave markers. He carries out secret investigations, revisits old crimes, digs into police and other public records, and -- almost miraculously, it seems -- uncovers answers at a terrific rate. But we never learn anything about John's background, or his motivation, or how he set up the (apparently) vast system of agents and informants that enable him to do what he does, and that's a large part of the problem. Who is he, that he can get such amazing results so quickly? What hold does he have over those who work for him -- many of them in violation of the laws governing their real jobs? (We only see him adding one new agent, which he does by blackmail.) There's no "origin story," in other words. The larger problem also is that the book has the feel of a small collection of stories ripped out of a much larger (but actually nonexistent) narrative, so we get no back-story and no reason to empathize with the protagonist. There are four story arcs here, three of them rather short. The longest one actually has the feel of a climactic episode to what should have been that longer presumed narrative, which the reader knows nothing about, and never will. This is a shame because the story lines themselves are pretty well developed internally, the dialogue is first-rate, and Azceta's artwork suits the style of the text perfectly.

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