I started off last week’s review by saying that I was glad that comic had a short archive because reading it felt endless. This week, I feel the opposite. I would gladly have pushed through an archive four times as long as “Night Owls” currently sports; even with a weak wireless signal slowing down the loading of the flash pages, reading this comic went way too fast.

This is the kind of story I love. I’ve been a fan of the old pulp novels for as long as I can remember – toss me a Doc Savage or Shadow story, I’m usually sucked right in. Night Owls is firmly entrenched in that genre, and also has tongue lodged firmly in cheek.

It would be easy for the Timony brothers to let their lead character be the classic pulp type: someone like Clark Savage or Lamont Cranston, or even DC Comics’ venerable but virtually unknown Doctor Occult (created, like Superman, by Siegel and Shuster). Someone strong, stalwart, silent. A real macho man. Instead, they make Ernest Baxter the opposite: he is scrawny, bookish, talkative to a fault. A sensitive man. He’d rather analyze a situation than fight, but he will fight if he has to (as evidenced by his quickly lost throw-down with a gang of vampires). He’s likable, and has an interesting flaw: he’s allergic to sunlight. Take that piece of information and assume what you will; I won’t spoil anything here.

They do populate the rest of the cast with classic types, but often with a slight twist that keeps “classic” from being “complete stereotype.” Baxter’s Gal Friday, Mindy Markus, could go toe-to-toe with her contemporaries Lois Lane, Margo Lane, Rose Psychic and Patricia Savage and hold her own just fine – it’s a fine tradition of scrappy women but Mindy deviates from the stereotype by being more physically involved in the cases than Baxter and pretty much never playing the damsel in distress. Roscoe is a play on the classic street-bruiser type, and I can imagine him playing poker with Savage’s Monk Mayfair, The Shadow’s cab-driver Shreevy, and Green Lantern’s cabbie “Doiby” Dickles … the nice twist being Roscoe is a gargoyle, not just an excitable New Yorker (some readers will say there’s no difference between the two). There is of course the close police contact reminiscent of Jim Gordon and Joe Cardona, although in Night Owls he is also the strong, somewhat silent type that Baxter is not. Since Night Owls has only been around for about 61 pages, there hasn’t been the time to develop a real rogues gallery, but Doctor You, who steals other people’s faces in order to commit his crimes, has the potential to be Baxter’s John Sunlight, Shiwan Khan or Joker … or perhaps an interesting mix of all three. There are other potentially-recurring bad-guys as well: Big Eagle Eye (a mythical creature) and that aforementioned gang of vampires.

The art is smooth, stylish, definitely what would have been on the pages of the Sunday comics in the 20s or in the pages of More Fun or Detective Comics in the late 30s. The characters don’t all blend together, the backgrounds are detailed, the panels are distinct and varied enough to keep each page interesting. The story looks good in black and white, as befits the era. They refer to each section of the series as a season, but I think it’s more fair to equate it to the Saturday morning serials: it doesn’t dwell on any particular story for long, keeping the action moving and tossing off one-liners regularly as page-enders.

I give Night Owls four stars. Definitely adding it to my list of regular reads, even though the Zuda site often gives my laptop fits of apoplexy. Rating:

Peter and Robert Timony’s “Night Owls”

http://zudacomics.com/the_night_owls

reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

 Loading …