“First of all, because I saw this cover tiny on Goodreads, I thought, because of the black coat and the white rectangle, that Newburn was a PRIEST.
If you read the opening pages thinking he’s a priest, it kind of works. He shows up at a crime scene, sort of a parallel to the police force that’s not exactly welcomed with open arms by police. There seems to be a bloody scene. I was like, “Rad, demon possession or something?”
Maybe 10 pages in, I was like, Waitaminute, and I examined the cover at full size and discovered that Newburn was not a priest, and also that this little white shape was on his back, not his front (and not because he’s some kind of radical priest who got into Kriss Kross, turned his coat backwards in 1991, and never looked back.
Newburn is good. It works. The premise is good. I think it’d be a super good book to read once the run is complete, if it’s a limited series kind of thing, because I feel like the tenuous world occupied by Newburn is one that’s going to collapse in different ways at different times, and there’s a tension build there that’s pretty nice.
The last issue might have gotten a little too far into coincidental territory for my liking, things got kind of crossovery in a way comics sometimes do, where it feels like the entire city these characters occupy most be like 5 blocks in total, but whatever, it’s fine, it was a setup that was too much coincidence, but then the story plays out nicely, and Chip Zdarsky does it once again.
Now if Newburn would just go to seminary, I’d have everything I need.”