Vinyl

Walter is a serial killer.  We’re not told how many people he’s killed over the years, but it’s certainly enough for him to have a signature thing he associates with his kills.  That would be how he associates each of them with a unique song.  His best friend (in his own mind), a retired FBI agent named Dennis, knows this and that’s why he’s been meeting Walter at an outdoor coffee shop in Kansas, under Bureau surveillance, for the past year.  It’s Dennis’ hope that Walter will slip up and reveal some information that will allow him to finally arrest this killer.  Things take a turn in the latest encounter when a woman forces Dennis to come with her and her followers in order to settle an old score.  Walter doesn’t like the look of this and after doing some investigating, he realizes that he can’t take this woman and her cult down alone.  He’s going to need some help from some like-minded friends.

“Vinyl” comes to us from writer Doug Wagner and artist Daniel Hillyard.  They’re the creative team who gave us the wonderfully twisted serial killer goes on a rampage to save his sex doll story “Plastic,” and the not quite as good stripper revenge story “The Ride:  Burning Desire.”  Their latest effort winds up somewhere between the two, quality-wise.  It comes down to a matter of tone as I was expecting a darkly comic story based on the solicitations, but it’s more dark than comic.  This is a story about serial killers with their own hang-ups going after much worse people and it made for a more intense read than I was expecting.  The catch here is that Wagner isn’t able to subdue his jokey impulses and the result is a story where the comedy undermines the suspense.

The other big issue here, and I hate to say it, is Hillyard’s art.  By any reasonable standard his work here is fantastic in that he comes off like fusion of Ryan Ottley and Tradd Moore with the former’s attention to detail and the latter’s penchant for gleefully exaggerated violence.  Unfortunately Hillyard’s general style is so bright that the menace and tension that the story wants to project is subdued and it comes off feeling like a straightforward action story instead.  I was still invested in the story throughout and there’s no denying that Wagner and Hillyard have created a memorable cast of characters for this miniseries.  It’s just that their default styles in writing and art come off as opposed to the kind of story that they want to tell here.