I don’t know why I should keep reading Noir. It’s a perfectly serviceable comic for Dynamite to exploit a couple licenses they hold–The Shadow and Miss Fury–but there’s nothing else going on with it.

The art, from Andrea Mutti, is pretty good. So’s the writing, actually. Victor Gischler does a fine enough job with it. He’s got the Shadow teaming up with some Spanish lady spy to track down some kind of artifact. It feels a little like a pulp, but a pulp with some Indiana Jones type stuff thrown in. Only in the United States instead of Europe somewhere.

Gischler does okay with the Shadow’s narration and with the dialogue. He just doesn’t come up with a reason to keep going on the comic. It’s competent and disposable. I didn’t realize there were still people who blindly bought Shadow comics but Dynamite must think those people exist.

C 

CREDITS

Writer, Victor Gischler; artist, Andrea Mutti; colorist, Vladimir Popov; letterer, Rob Steen; editors, Molly Mahan and Joseph Rybandt; publisher, Dynamite Entertainment.