Writers: David Bircham and Daley Osiyemi
Artist: David Bircham
Publisher: Markosia
Reviewer: Dan Grendell

When body-switching goes wrong...

BRODIE'S LAW has a fairly interesting premise. The protagonist, Jack Brodie, is a thief who steals a secret formula that allows you to take on the DNA, appearance, and persona of people you touch. When his wife is killed and his son kidnapped, he uses it (with the help of researcher Tomokai Yoshida) to rescue his son. Unfortunately, it seems that spending too long in another person's form will overwhelm your mind with theirs, and so Jack has begun believing he's a man named Harry Wade, and is under police protection in a hospital after delivering his son to safety. Enter Tomokai, intent on rescuing him and fixing his mind before it's too late. Unfortunately, nobody told Tomokai's gangster family that she is helping Jack willingly, and when they find her, they aren't going to wait for explanations.

Considering that I jumped into a fairly complicated plot this issue, it was pretty easy to pick up on what was happening. A big part of that is due to the unusually helpful "what has gone before"-type blurb on the inside cover, but the writing and interweaving of the story elements was such that jumping right in was fairly painless, something I honestly didn't expect. Kudos to Bircham and Osiyemi for that. The action of the book also kept my interest all the way through quite well, keeping me wondering if Jack was in fact going to make it to wherever Tomokai was taking him or if it was all going to go to hell. I never got the feeling that it was a given that Jack would be cured, and I'm still not sure. That's a mark of good suspense.

Bircham's art is an interesting style for this kind of book, as he uses very fat lines and the colors are very bold and often overstated. The end result is artwork that reaches off the page and grabs at your eyes, and though that works in some instances, in others different panels fight each other for attention on the page. The layouts end up just looking over-busy on a lot of pages, though when Bircham gives himself 3/4 page panels or splash pages, the impact is intense.

BRODIE'S LAW is a smart book with a different premise, and I'll be curious to see where it goes. I'll be keeping an eye on it.