Comic Cuts - 22 March 2019

My latest little side project to reprint a few Gwyn Evans novels has progressed a little. I now have text for the first two books and hopefully both sets of text have been stripped of any OCR errors. At some point I'm going to have to scan the other two books, but not this weekend as I have family things planned.

I'm still not sure what to do about covers. I have a good scan of the third cover but only middling-sized scans of books one and two. I only have a tiny, low-res, wonky photograph of the fourth that will look terrible if I try to blow it up. It's unfixable. Given these circumstances, I'm thinking that I need new front covers and can use small versions of the original covers as part of the design for the back of the books. I might just about be able to get away with the low quality of that last one that way.

But that leaves me with the problem of needing four covers. I've been mulling this over all week and I'm still coming up blank. Actually, that's not quite true... I have had one idea – I just don't know whether I've got the skills to make it look good (I'm not an artist, nor am I a graphic designer). I'll have to have a play around to see if I can make the idea work.

I was a fan of True Detective from the beginning, the eight-episode debut series that starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. It was broadcast back in 2014 and I picked up the DVD in 2016, followed pretty quickly by the DVD of season two, which was an entirely new cast (Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams), story and director. If I remember correctly, it was given a bit of a kicking when it was broadcast in 2015 and there were questions over whether a third season would be made.

Well, it was, and it debuted on HBO two months ago.  It retains its creator and chief writer, Nic Pizzolatto, and saw director Cary Joji Fukunaga return. Fukunaga, incidentally, replaced Danny Boyle as the director of the next James Bond movie, recently revealed to be called Shatterhand.

The new series of eight episodes has been very well reviewed and I'm not going to buck that trend. The story weaves through three different time periods and three different investigations into the same crime. Two young children go missing in 1980 and two Arkansas police officers are assigned to the case. Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali) and Roland West (Stephen Dorff) question the father and follow up what few clues they uncover. Hays, a former army vet with experience of tracking in Vietnam, discovers the site of the young Will Purcell's death and his body hidden in a cave. The boys' younger sister, Julie, remains untraced.

In 1990, the case is reopened when fingerprints matching Julie Purcell's are discovered. West is put in charge and he persuades his bosses to bring in Hays, who has been demoted from homicide. It is West's task not to upset the conviction of a Native American named Brett Woodard for the murder of Will Purcell but he agrees with Hays that this time they will discover the truth.

In 2015, Hays is suffering from memory loss but agrees to be filmed for a TV show about the murders. His interviewer seems to have new evidence and Hays looks for the first time at the book his wife (whom he met during the original investigation) wrote on the murders.

The threads of the investigation of the missing children and the personal lives of the investigators interweave as the story unfolds during these three different time frames. At times the story threatens to grow bigger, into a tale of sex trafficking with possible connections to Las Vegas... and then it shrinks back down to become a series of more personal tragedies. It will certainly keep you uncertain of where it's going right up to the end.

It was a slow burn compared to the last couple of shows I've watched (The Punisher, Counterpart), but all the better for it and the whole thing wraps up in a very satisfying way. I like these anthology series. I think I'd have to say my favourite is Fargo, but True Detective isn't far behind. I guess we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed now that there will be a season four.

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