Dark Horse’s “Bang!” #1, an excerpt from “Suite Death: A Thomas Cord Novel, is penned by Matt Kindt who, in this comic, mimics the style of a hardened crime fiction bodice-ripper with deadly accuracy. Given the fact that Matt is one who draws up cheesy, blustering romantic novels for survival, he does quite the justice to this noir novel. 

Matt Kindt introduces Mr. Thomas Cord to us as a self-congratulatory, roving, gentleman, spy and adventurer. His charming smirk and dry sparkling intelligence are absolutely irresistible. Goldmaze’s (a secret criminal organization) thuggish minions interrogate the secret agent and played their role amazingly.

In addition, Wilfredo Torres’s art is quite scintillating as it gives Cord his heroic features. A squared jaw, vast shoulders, and V-shaped torso- daring hero of yesteryear. The story runs around cliffside mansions, gorgeous femmes Fatale, tense shootouts, daring escapes, mysterious McGuffin manuscripts with some secret codes. Basically the tropes on display here are all too familiar. 

But the moment they wrenched out from under us and became violent, the story reaches a completely new exciting level. 

More About the Comic

It becomes very difficult, to sum up the premise when a comic like this one holds such a major entertaining plot twist in the first few pages i.e., without ruining the effect for those who haven’t read it yet. 

Must agree that the concepts are really funny, experimental and over the top. It seems that it comes straight from the British Spy tales of the ‘60s like the Avengers, The Prisoner, The Spy with My Face and so on. It can be clearly seen in the story that the creators or makers have a deep love for source materials. 

So what happens at the end of the first issue? Well, an evil cliffhanger jumps over a game board only to disclose a totally different brain-teasing pattern beneath.