Good as Dead

The town of Port Linden was your average, quiet place with its conflicts and crimes being strictly of the small-time variety.  Until Professor David Yao burned himself alive along with his research on the only bridge leading out of town.  That would’ve been enough to keep Sheriff David Calhoun and his Deputy, Lenore, busy for a while if only the grand opening of the new bridge hadn’t ended in abject disaster with the deaths of over a hundred people.  Now the sheriff is racing against the clock to find out what’s behind these incidents before all of the town’s secrets – be they local or federal – claim the lives of everyone else within it.

“Good as Dead” may come from the husband-and-wife creative team of artist/co-writer/letterer David Lapham and co-writer Maria Lapham, but it wouldn’t be right to hold this to the standards of their creator-owned work.  That’s because this series comes with a “Created by” credit at the start from Chris Black and Skybound CEO David Alpert.  Part of me wonders if this was intended to be a cable/streaming miniseries they couldn’t get off the ground, but they convinced the Laphams to take a crack at it and now we have the story in comic book form.

With that caveat in place, don’t expect this to be on the same level as “Stray Bullets” (still waiting for the rest of “Sunshine & Roses” to be collected/completed over here).  This expansive and winding story of small-town rot and weirdness doesn’t have the same unpredictability and grab-you-by-the-throat drama of their signature title.  What it does have is a likable cast whose eccentricities are generally endearing, and who benefit from the extra space and time the Laphams have and take to flesh them out with.

By that I mean even though this is a $25 paperback, it has a page count that justifies its price point.  That’s something which could’ve easily been the story’s undoing as there have been plenty of instances where creators have used this kind of extra space to needlessly draw out their story.  The Laphams don’t do that here, and even though “Good as Dead” isn’t immune from having its slow parts or bits that are weird for weirdness’ sake, you’ll be thoroughly invested in the struggle of its main cast by the time things start ramping up for its conclusion.  Which is a bit abrupt in itself, but not enough to make me think that fans of the creators or oddball small-town crime stories won’t enjoy this themselves.