Writer: Tony Bedard
Artists: Karl Moline (p), John Dell (i)
Publisher: CrossGen
This is as near to perfect a CrossGen book as you are ever likely to see, an essential purchase, the best book they have ever released, and the start of something great.
You want more?
Cassie Starkweather is your typical high school teenager, she has boy troubles, she has homework troubles, she loves her friends...oh, and she can see that some people are not really people, but werewolves...or vampires...or demons. She can also see people's spirits before they pass on to the hereafter, as well as the spirits of demons and angels as they fight over which direction the spirits travel.
This hits home when her best friend suffers a horrible accident at school and Cassie is visited at home by the spirit of her friend, begging for help as the hospital workers are not what they seem.
Cassie does as she's told - i.e. tells her parents - and it promptly sent to the loony bin. Unfortunately some key people working their are also demons - although it seems crazy early on that Cassie bumps into so many demons-as-humans, it is all explained logically later on in the book, it's a duh moment as you hit your head in realisation. Cue a few scenes of real peril and Cassie is on the run, leaving two or three dead demons behind ... except, of course, the police think these are dead people, so she's now being hunted down by both demons and feds...
That's the first two chapters dealt with then...
Yeah, there's a lot in the book, it's a fast-paced thriller, you are never really sure who or what can be trusted, and a seeming ally hides a nasty secret - revealed by the end of the book, so you're not kept in suspense or forced into buying a subsequent volume to find it out.
About the only problems with this trade are the omissions of reprints of the inside front covers of the original issues (recap pieces framed as letters or reports, really nice creative pieces of work of which you only get one in this book - it's a crime, frankly), the book has no defined ending (no "end of book one" on the last page, just a sigil), and there's no indication of the length of this series - it's the sort of book that would benefit from a clearly defined beginning, middle and end structure, say a 30-issue (five trade) duration, rather than the possibility of being strung out ad nauseam.
Minor points, it's an excellent read...a superb selection for your next (or indeed, first) CrossGen book.
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