OneMetal.com book REVIEW:
Fogtown

Vertigo Crime invites readers into the seedy underbelly of a 50s San Francisco with Fogtown, a noir-styled graphic novel told from the perspective of a private eye named Frank Grissel. The often drunk detective has more than a skeleton or two hidden in his closet.

When an anxious mother approaches Grissel with a picture of her lost daughter and a wad of cash, his long-time secretary and jealous lover Loretta tasks him with the job. The ordinary missing persons report escalates into a serial murder investigation, with prostitutes landing in the morgue every other night. Grissel stumbles into the center of bribes and small favors, pinned between a Chinese shipping heiress, an untrustworthy priest, and a “Colonel” with a hand in the city’s pockets. The deeper he looks, the more trouble he finds. His name making the police’s suspect list ranks as the least of Grissel’s worries, though, when past mistakes catch up with him and business becomes personal. Running from the authorities and those who want him dead (or alive long enough to deliver incriminating ledgers), Grissel must prove his innocence and turn the heat on his enemies before the bullet bites him instead.

As a crime drama, Fogtown is riddled with cliches that Brad Rader (HBO’s Spawn) only exaggerates to silliness through his black-and-white illustrations. Both the artist and writer Andersen Gabrych (Detective Comics, Batman, Batgirl) reduce the book’s professional women to sexual objects with capricious personalities—a fitting quality for shallow “dames,” but not for a story’s love interest, powerful opponent, or sharp-as-knives female lead. Gabrych also glazes over the many a-ha private eye moments, forcing readers into accepting leaps of faith and leaving them without a clue as to Grissel’s supposedly brilliant deductive reasoning.

What saves Fogtown from being utterly dry, though, is the homosexuality (mainly Grissel’s) and gender confusion that accompanies the string of murders and lies. Somewhere near the book’s end, Gabrych actually manages to produce a surprisingly interesting commentary on such themes, a message that unfortunately the writer buries underneath Fogtown’s mundane noir stuffing, one-dimensional characters, and increasingly comical sex scenes.

Bottom Line

A crime mystery hoarding a few twists, Fogtown's cliches tend to override its smarts, and good moments vanish into the fog.