Written by Deniz Camp

Art by Javier Rodriguez

Letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

FBI Agent John Jones should be dead. Caught in a bomb explosion, John walked out banged up but basically fine. He just wants to go back to work. he just wants to stop seeing the multi-coloured smoke he’s seeing everywhere. He just wants to know how he sees the secrets of everyone around him.

He’s about to find out.

All three of these new additions to the Absolute line have been impressive but this is astonishing. Rodriguez’s colour work and Otsmane-Elhaou’s lettering are vital parts of the tone and story as well as the look, the former balances the brittle harsh dialogue of the FBI with the languid, fluid words of the creature John keeps hearing in his mind. The latter gives the book a Cronenbergian, queasy tone. John is wading through a fog of multi-coloured thoughts, and we start to panic just as he does. We learn what it truly is at the same time too and the book’s payoff is a glorious piece of visual sleight of hand that’s resolutely old-fashioned and absolutely brand new.

Camp’s script exists between those two compass points. John is an old-fashioned G-Man and an old fashioned man, uncomfortable with being a family man, with anything other than his job. The creature in his head is a fluid, graceful, serene form. Comfortable where he’s tense, coloured where he’s monochrome. Free where he’s trapped by his trauma, his job, his suit, himself. Neither of them whole, both of them desperate to be something more than they were. They are.

Verdict: This is an incredible, visually stunning and relentlessly confident first issue. It takes everything about the character that works and does it in a manner that’s both entirely new and entirely faithful. Like John and his passenger, this is something new and like them, it’s off to a great start. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart