Bog Bodies

Killian is your average twentysomething layabout in Dublin, playing videogames in between doing jobs for the local mob.  What kind of jobs you ask?  The kind that usually involve disappearing a corpse into the local wetlands.  His partner on these jobs is an older, swearier gent named Keano, who has just come by with the latest one.  It’s all business as usual until Killian finds himself wounded and on the run through the wetlands, forest, and countryside as he tries to survive the night.  He’s not alone for long, however, as he winds up meeting a young woman who is also on the run for different reasons.  Two heads are always better than one they say, but when one of them is a screw-up like Killian will he just wind up dragging them both down?

“Bog Bodies” comes to us from Declan Shalvey and Gavin Fullerton.  Shalvey is better known around here for his art, and this represents the first time I’ve encountered his writing.  It’s not bad, assuming you’re not put off by copious amounts of profanity and Irish slang.  The real problem here is that his reach exceeds his grasp as what looks like a small-scale crime caper with black comedy overtones eventually tries to tackle weightier themes about cycles of violence and redemption without much success by the end.  There’s also Shalvey’s attempt to work in the supernatural into the plot, and while it doesn’t completely derail things, the story would’ve been better served if the writer hadn’t gone there.

Things fare a bit better in regards to the art from Fullerton.  He’s got a style that has a solid foot in the school of caricature, and if you can appreciate that then you’ll find that his characters serve the story well.  Better still is how he manages to keep a story set at night in the Irish wetlands visually interesting while keeping the expected scenes of characters standing in front of a black background to a minimum.  This ultimately leaves you feeling that while “Bog Bodies” isn’t exactly a bad graphic novel, the time you spent reading it could’ve been better spent elsewhere.