Comic Review: Old Dog #1

Image Comics

Writer: Declan Shalvey

Art: Declan Shalvey

Letters: Clayton Cowles

This week sees the release of the first issue of Old Dog created by writer and artist, Declan Shalvey. A spy-fi fresh from the oven by powerhouse Shalvey did catch my attention, so I thought I’d give it a go. Old Dog‘s about a failed CIA agent, Jack Lynch, who we meet in a surveillance mission right before his retirement. The issue opens with what seems to be a younger operative carrying out an assignment on the field at an unknown time and location. It then cuts to our protagonist sitting in a computer-lit van and two other colleagues discussing Jack’s failures at the job. Then something goes terribly wrong and he has to enter the building. Jack, after finding one of his teammates dying, goes further and finds a peculiar-looking machine, right before it explodes. Shalvey leads the writing for this series in a fascinating approach to a spy story. Taking advantage of how information gets redacted in this genre, Shalvey implies and deceives the reader in order to deliver a maximum punch at the end. The issue also has a nice pace to it, cutting back and forth to younger Jack and highlighting the contrast between his life then, as a man of action, and now, as a desk jockey. By cutting off at key moments in each segment, the payoff at the issue’s final page only increases. This is beautifully conveyed in the artwork as well. Not only are the settings really different from one another, but the coloring follows this trend as we see old Jack in the cold light of his closing career and young, hot-blooded Jack in a warm sunset palette. That not being enough, Shalveys delivers on action sequences quite nicely as a promise for what’s to come. There’s yet another interesting approach in the artwork but I’m afraid it’s a bit too spoiler-y by itself. However, I can say that it runs with the tricking and confusing the reader gimmick very well and shows us that no one really knows what happened to Lynch at the explosion. Clayton Cowles will be handling letters for the series. Cowles’ work is quite discreet on most speech bubbles but he does very well whenever there’s wiggle room. The segment that I liked the most in this issue were the delayed lines when Lynch confronts the man in the building. The choice of detaching the text from the actual bubbles was just genius. It really brings forth that something is messing with sound in that place. Old Dog‘s is off to a great start! Shalvey is showing great consistency between all the structural aspects of the comic as well as maneuvering around the truth of the story very smoothly which is just perfect for the spy theme.