Old Dog [Redact One] vol. 1

Jack Lynch wasn’t the best agent the C.I.A. had, but he was on track to have a productive career.  Then he wound up in a Russian prison after one mission went bad and then spent the next couple of decades either behind a desk or doing the kind of boring jobs that they give to new recruits.  It’s during one of these jobs that he finds himself getting involved directly and having a strange machine blow up in his face for his trouble.  When he wakes up, eight years have passed and he’s… different.  Stronger, more resilient, and able to shift into a younger version of himself, he’s now of great interest to a secret organization known as Black Circle who want to study him and, in return, give him the career he thought was lost.

At first glance “Old Dog” comes off like the kind of procedural that Warren Ellis produced a lot of before his career was derailed after many, many women he had encounters with decided they were sick of the way they were treated by him and let the world know about it.  While “Global Frequency” is still the best example of the kind of espionage tales mixed with weird sci-fi overtones that creator Declan Shalvey feels like he’s trying to emulate here, the creator is also telling an ongoing story here as Jack tries to rebuild his life post-coma.  This is mainly seen through the many testy encounters he has with his daughter Keelin over the course of the volume, but there’s also a sense that we’re dealing with a man who has left a lot of wreckage over the course of his life and is trying to put some of it back in working order.

All this is delivered with the kind of tough-guy speak and wounded machismo that is more dull for its familiarity than anything else.  Shalvey tries to compensate for this by way of Lynch’s strange powers, but that turns out to be this volume’s main Achilles Heel.  We’re given a vague idea of what he’s capable of at first, but then things get stranger, drift into body horror, and then into what appears to be multiverse theory.  I could be wrong about any of those because at no point does the creator actually specify what his protagonist is capable of.  It feels less like a mystery to be solved than something that hasn’t been properly thought through for the story being told.

Shalvey does deliver the action in this volume with an efficient level of brutality that’s involving throughout.  Which is good, because there’s a lot of it here.  The composition and storytelling displayed in his art is also on point and that kept me reading more than anything else.  So it’s a shame that the story he’s telling is built on such a shaky foundation involving his protagonist and the man’s nebulous abilities.  Ellis did hype up this volume in his newsletter, but the end result had me wishing the writer had been involved here as he was with Shalvey on “Injection” and “Moon Knight.”