Lapham, David – Murder Me Dead

Website

Murder Me Dead

There’s only one reason that David wasn’t one of the first people that I put up on the page, and that’s because he doesn’t have a website. Stupid, I know, and it takes away from the point of having most of the page be dedicated to small press stuff. What’s more small press than not even having your own web page, even if he is getting some kind of “mainstream” (it’s ridiculous to even use that word in connection with comics) acceptance? Anyway, I decided to sit down and read this whole series at once today, and I can longer accept not having him on the page. This was a long, good book from somebody who was already very good at telling short stories. This is a noir tale about a man who has his rich, aloof wife kill herself and the problems he deals with from there. It’s not as simple as that, obviously. He finds an old crush from high school, and there’s the current mistress he has to deal with. Throw in a private detective hired by his mother-in-law who wants desperately to see him suffer and you have a smorgasboard of deceit and betrayal. Nobody involved in this is an innocent in any way, and the story had me guessing right up until the very end, which is all you can ask out of a story like this.

Even with as good as this was, it was obvious that he’s still learning. He had this planned as an eight issue series and it ended up being nine, with the last one being twice as big. I thought it could have been shaved down just the slightest bit, so maybe he should have stuck with the original plan. Still, it’s tough to use a lot of the noir dialogue in the modern day, so it’s tough to say that it would have worked any better if it was wordier and shorter than it did when there were large silent chunks in this to tell you what was going on. This is a major work from somebody who is still learning his trade (don’t forget the fact that he’s prolific, which is so incredibly rare in quality comics), and I for one can’t wait to see what he does next. I’ll put a link up to buy this as soon as I find one, but until then you can always just contact the author if you’re really interested and don’t live near and good comic shops, as most of them would at least be able to get this: El Capitan Books P.O. Box 351508 Los Angeles, CA 90035.