The One Hand & The Six Fingers

Detective Ari Nassar is about to retire.  He’s had a hell of a career with his tenacious nature leading to the collar of numerous criminals in the city of Neo Novena.  Chief among them being the One Hand Killer – twice.  However, just as Ari’s about to call it quits, he finds out that another murder has been committed.  Another murder in the style of the One Hand Killer.  Is this just a copycat, or did this murderer somehow evade capture the previous two times?  Ari is going to find out, retirement be damned.

Johannes Vale is an aspiring archaeologist who works during the day in a toxic power plant.  He wants to get the hell out of the city and research the origins of the mysterious object that was given to him by his father before the man died.  There’s just one problem:  Johannes murdered a man in cold blood last night and he doesn’t even know why he did it.  Worse still is that he did it in the same fashion as the infamous One Hand Killer.  It may seem like his life has just gone straight to hell, but fortunately for Johannes he has the city on his side.

“The One Hand & The Six Fingers” collects two separate but related miniseries.  “The One Hand” is from writer Ram V and artist Laurence Campbell, and follows Detective Nassar as he tracks down the latest incarnation of the titular killer.  “The Six Fingers” comes to us from writer Dan Watters and artist Sumit Kumar, and deals with Johannes as he adapts to the new complications in his life.  The idea is that both miniseries are tackling the same story from different perspectives, and only crossing over at key points in the narrative.  It’s a clever approach that got both titles some notice when they were being serialized as single issues.

Reading them both in this collected edition, with each chapter alternating between the issues of each miniseries, it feels more clever than satisfying.  Ari’s story doesn’t make a good impression at first, coming off like a moody assemblage of near-retirement cop story cliches.  Johannes’ adventures are more interesting at first as we find out that the killer here isn’t some genius mastermind, but an arrogant little prick who can’t understand why his life is coming unraveled.  Even so, neither story’s first chapter led me to expect that we were going to get anything resembling greatness here.

That remained true to the end of these stories, though they both got better.  Ari’s in particular managed to rise above the assemblage of tropes it was created from and becomes significantly weirder around the halfway point and maintains that feeling through its end.  The killer’s story doesn’t have the same kind of improvement, but it manages to be strange in its own way over the course of its run.

If there’s a problem that both titles share, it’s that they stop rather than end.  It’s clear that V and Watters intended things this way and wanted the reader to puzzle over the implications in their stories respective final pages.  V manages this better as Ari’s choice at the end feels right considering everything he’s been through.  Unfortunately the writer has to resort to addressing it via a two-page dialogue transcript that also drops some major bits of exposition and worldbuilding on the reader right at the last second.  Watters doesn’t quite bungle his finale with Johannes reaching a definitive end, but the larger ramifications of his plan don’t satisfy because they raise more questions in the end.

Of the two artists illustrating these titles, Campbell does the better job.  While he showed that he was capable of illustrating all kinds of supernatural weirdness during his time in the Mignolaverse on “B.P.R.D.,” Campbell shows himself to be really good with depicting a shadowy near-future cityscape and its inhabitants.  He brings a fittingly grim mood and style to all of the proceedings making them feel appropriately dramatic even when the story’s cliches threatened to turn it into silliness.  Kumar’s work is smoother and less moody, but still pleasing to the eye.  The artist tells his side of the story well enough, but without the same level of intensity that Campbell brings to his.

While I appreciate that the creators were trying to do something new with their approach to this story between two miniseries, “The One Hand & The Six Fingers” still feels like an ambitious failure to me in the end.  It does have the novelty of its format, Campbell’s art, and evolving strangeness of the narrative going for it.  Yet parts of the story are bogged down by familiar tropes and the big revelations about its world ultimately don’t go anywhere in the end.  If nothing else, I’d be interested in seeing the creators give this approach another go at a later date just to see if they can get it right next time.