Plastic: Death & Dolls

Before he met Virginia, the inflatable love of his life, Edwyn was just your average diner worker taking life a day at a time.  Which also included taking the lives of people who he felt deserved it – like the guy who tried to play cat soccer – by sawing off their heads with his trusty pipe saw.  That all changes one day when a girl comes into the diner Edwyn works at and attracts the attention of his blind friend Booker.  The problem is that this girl is on the run from some very bad men and they’re not about to let a couple of nobodies stand in the way of getting what they want.  Which is too bad for them when Edwyn gets involved.

Several years back, writer Doug Wagner and artist Daniel Hillyard gave us “Plastic” which introduced us to Edwyn and delivered a darkly comic and action-packed revenge story as he fought some bad men to get Virginia back.  The creators followed it up with other series about serial killers, “Vinyl” and “Plush” which made up their Materials Trilogy that weren’t quite on the same level.  “Death & Dolls” isn’t either as it lacks the dark humor that livened up the original story and plays everything straight.  Which leads to the reader getting a solidly executed story where a serial killer kills some even worse people in brutal and gory fashion.

While all this has lots of vibrancy thanks to Hillyard’s lively art, it all feels really unnecessary in the end.  That’s because this prequel also goes to great lengths to explain Edwyn as we learn about his surprisingly happy upbringing with his mom and her collection of dolls, before she gets involved with a guy who turns out to be no good.  I think Edwyn worked better as a character in “Plastic” because we didn’t know about his history, making his relationship with Virginia weirdly sweet and creepy in equal measure.  Here the mystery is stripped away and the story isn’t any better for it, which REALLY doesn’t bode well for the sequel teased on this volume’s final page.