This comic book is good yet just falls short of being as good as it needs to be. Whoever wrote the blurb on the back cover has done the book no favours, it gives a very mistaken impression of the contents, in addition there is a prologue which serves no clear or useful purpose. Once you get to the actual stories themselves, matters improve considerably.
The book is a series of short crime stories centering around the Green Manor club, they involve members of the club in one for or another and all take place in Victorian London. The stories are short with a twist and are well crafted. The problems are that they are not quite sharp enough to be satisfying. For such stories to work they need to be coiled very tightly, with a considerable core of repressed energy so that the twist has some savagery and momentum. The stories in the book do not create that energy, they are all well constructed and the plots are solid, they are just a bit tame.
That art does not help in this regard, it is slightly cartoony and it tends to soften the impact of the stories. The book really is a bit of a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
