Jack Hammer #1

Jack McGriskin is a private detective with a strong right arm and a penchant for sticking his nose into other people’s problems.

When a missing person he’s been hired to find turns up dead, he stumbles onto a network of corruption stretching from the streets of Boston to the halls of Congress itself, and the trail takes him back into a world he left behind…

An Action Lab story based in Boston?  SOLD.  No further review necessary.

Ok, maybe I should say more than that.  And for disclaimer, I live just under an hour outside Boston, not in it, but that’s still wicked awesome (see what I did there?)  Along with Beantown being the well chosen setting for Jack Hammer, it’s a gritty crime tale that also happens to involve superheroes.  Or at least, super humans and the possibility of their being heroes and villains.  Either way, that’s a winning combo in my mind.

So how does this combination work you might wonder? It works quite well in fact, with our so to speak hero being a private investigator working out of Southie.  The good old glamour days, if he ever really had any, are gone though as it seems he barely scrapes by now.  His most recent case looks to be a well paid one that should be over, but he’s not one to let a murder just go at that.  This is what sets him on a path to trouble, and that’s exactly what he’s in at the end.

With a dark and dirty story like this, rough pencils are more than an appropriate style to use here.  Even with that rough look though, they manage to pull off clean visualization.  Predominantly darker colors fill in the artwork as you would expect, but are vibrant when they need to be.  Altogether, the artwork teams perfectly with the story to bring the story to life.

I suppose by now that me giving two thumbs up to an Action Labs book is really no surprise.  Putting that aside though, this is a great first issue regardless of who published it.  I would certainly suggest getting this one and putting it in your collection.  Which if you’ve read enough of my reviews just might be filled with Action Labs.

For more information on Jack Hammer or other Action Lab titles, check out Action Labs.

Geek-o-Rama received a copy of this book for the purpose of this review. All thoughts, comments and opinions are those of the individual reviewer.