Black Cloak vol. 1
Writer Kelly Thompson and artist Meredith McClaren’s “Heart in a Box” was one of my favorite titles last year. Re-issued in a new edition from Dark Horse, it took what sounded like a predictable setup – girl gives away her heart for peace of mind, comes to regret it, embarks on quest to get heart back – and wrung something that was both unexpected and moving in equal measure from it. So when it was revealed that the two were going to collaborate again on a fantasy law-enforcement series, I was determined to pick it up as soon as it received its first collection. That’s what I did ad while it was enjoyable and entertaining, I also have to say that this first volume of “Black Cloak” wasn’t quite as good as I was hoping it would be.
The setting of this title is the last city in the known world, Kiros. A beacon of civilization following hundreds of years of war, it’s also a powder keg with various different races at each other’s throats day in and day out. That’s where the Black Cloaks come in. A recent development, they’re effectively Kiros’ police force and while they’re a necessary tool to maintain the rule of law, they are despised and feared by the populace in equal measure.
Phaedra Essex is one such Black Cloak, along with her family man partner Theron Pax. This wasn’t the career she planned on having, as she was engaged to the son of the Elvish ruler of Kiros before circumstances caused her to break it off and face exile as a result. All of this is relevant because the body waiting for Phaedra in a lowtown flophouse one cold morning is that of her ex-fiancee Freyal III. He was well-liked and set to become the city’s next ruler, and now he’s dead. Phaedra can’t imagine a reason why someone would kill him, or that he’d kill himself, but she’s dedicated to finding out the answers now.
“Black Cloak” vol. 1 is an exercise in taking a big, high-concept premise and making it accessible to a general audience. Here we have a fantasy cosmopolitan city at the end of the world filled with lots of different peoples and their histories, and it’s being filtered through the lens of a police procedural. There’s nothing wrong with that as this setup does allow Thompson and McClaren to dole out their worldbuilding in measured ways without overwhelming the audience. Which is a distinct issue when you’re dealing with a story that has carnivorous mermaids that communicate through hallucinogens.
Phaedra naturally serves as the audience’s point-of-view character and she mostly does a good job of that. Working in her favor is that she’s clearly a capable professional who knows what she’s doing and is able to follow the leads she comes across to their logical conclusions. She’s also just as quippy as you’d hope for from a Thompson-written protagonist, with the humor working its way through a dense layer of cynicism and sarcasm to give it extra flavor. There’s also the matter of her deeply tragic backstory, which is effective, but also part of my issue with this storyline.
While Thompson and McClaren dole out enough worldbuilding to get you invested in Kiros and its inhabitants, they’re frustratingly vague on key aspects of it as the story goes on. Phaedra’s heritage is part of it since while it’s easy to accept that it can be hated by the general public, we’re given no reason as to why it is. This is something that’s compounded when her father enters the picture.
We’re also not told much about the magical cat-like beings, Taka, that turn out to be at the center of the story. They’re immediately likeable, as they’re adorably rendered by McClaren, but we’re not told anything else about them besides the fact that they’re adorable magic cats. For that matter, what’s the deal with the wars that led to Kiros’ formation? This is just one more thing we’re told about without any details given to them and that’s just one more disappointment here.
A bigger issue is how the story suddenly scales up for its climax. While the death of a prominent city figure is certainly a big deal, we wind up in what looks like end-of-the-world territory in the volume’s concluding pages. I understand how we got there from everything that came before, but it feels too soon for Thompson and McClaren to pull the trigger on this kind of storyline. They could walk things back in vol. 2, yet the note we end on doesn’t come off like it has earned its apocalyptic stakes.
They will have a chance to walk things back, though. The final page of the volume states that “Black Cloak” will return in 2023… which is almost over. However, a quick jaunt over to Thompson’s Substack reveals that more of the series is in the offing, just not yet. I can’t say that this first volume makes me want to start paying for her Substack so I can get more of the story the moment it’s available. It’s good enough, however, to get me to check out vol. 2 and see more of Phaedra’s adventures, and if we get some more details about this world that make it more compelling to me.