Weird Work

When Lady Haste was arrested for attempted murder, it was thought to be the beginning of the end for organized crime in Stellar City.  That turned out to not be the case at all as a series of gangland slayings have shown that control of the underworld is still very much up for grabs.  This is something that Detective Ovra Sawce has found out firsthand when he goes into work one day only to find out from the chief that his partner has been found dead in a warehouse along with the right-hand man of the city’s resident trillionaire, and a con-turned-cult leader.  If that wasn’t bad enough, Ovra finds out that his new partner is Donut Trustah, who was recently suspended on suspicion of taking bribes.  It might look like the world has it in for him right now, but Ovra is determined to find out who killed his partner no matter how weird things get.

With its twisting tale of police corruption, vengeful mobsters, and surrealist visuals, “Weird Work” feels like the unholy fusion of “The Untouchables,” “L.A. Confidential,” and “Rick & Morty.”  A lot of that is down to the distinctly stylized artwork of Shaky Kane who serves up a world where we’re immediately greeted with a pig-human politician getting serviced by an anteater prostitute in his car.  This is right before armed thugs descend on them and the politician is forced to eject out of the car, while dual-wielding tommy guns at his assailants.

Things only get weirder (visually) from there as Ovra and Donut make their way through the city to find out who killed the former’s partner.  Kane’s work never fails to entertain or dazzle the eye, seamlessly integrating the casual strangeness of the visuals with the deadpan straightforwardness of writer Justin Thomas’ script.  While the writing and the art work well together, I was still left wondering whether things would’ve been as memorable without the artist – or the last-page twist that feels like a bummer more than anything else.  Taken on what it delivered, “Weird Work” is still a very entertaining riff on the police procedural that shows execution matters a lot when you’re dealing with such familiar subject matter.