Spy Island: A Bermuda Triangle Mystery

Nora Freud is a spy.  She’s currently enduring the most boring station of her career on Bermuda as she deals with gathering information at endless fundraisers between bouts of weirdness like alien time bandits and ghost Nazi U-boat captains.  Then one day her sister, Connie, a marine cryptozoologist arrives by boat on the island.  Connie specializes in tracking mermaid movement and behavior and her arrival can only mean one thing:  Bermuda has a mermaid problem.  Which is trouble because while mermaids are normally peaceful creatures, they periodically go into angry, flesh-eating moods.  Not only do Nora and Connie have to figure out how to deal with this, they’ve also got to figure out what set the mermaids off in the first place.  It’s an explanation that will entail sand fleas, a mime, an undersea Atlantean preserve, a kraken, lots of sex, and many Pink Orgasms.

Writer Chelsea Cain and artists Lia Miternique and Else McCall’s miniseries is a frustrating one to review.  That’s because it has a fun sense of irreverence that flows through these four issues as Nora gives us an extremely deadpan take on being a spy in a world that looks like it’s not too far removed from the ridiculousness of “The Venture Brothers.”  This remains true throughout all four issues of this miniseries and McCall’s art is very much in sync with the tone that’s established by Cain’s writing.

The problem is that this world that the creators are establishing never quite comes to life.  We’re told about all of the weird and fantastic things that Nora has seen and done, as well as the fact that her world has a Brotherhood of Depravity made up of supervillains.  Yet what we see of this world doesn’t suggest that it’s too far removed from our own .  It may have mermaids and krakens, but they don’t figure too strongly in the story until the underwater fight at the end.  This leaves “Spy Island” as a miniseries that I wanted to like more than I actually did.  It is, however, one that I wouldn’t mind seeing more of if only to realize its potential.