The One Hand #1 Review

 

Writer: Ram V.

Artist: Laurence Campbell

Colorist: Lee Loughridge

Letterer: Aditya Bidikar

Cover Artists: Tom Muller, Laurence Campbell & Lee Loughridge

Publisher: Image

Price: $3.99

Release Date: February 7, 2024

 

After a long and successful career, Detective Ari Nassar is retiring from the Neo Novena Police Department. He seems resolved about his upcoming lifestyle change. If boredom strikes, Ari can always train boxers at the gym again. Will he let anything get in the way of the rest of his life? Let's leap into The One Hand #1 and find out!

 

Story

Ari receives retirement cards. His fellow police give him presents. He eats his cake and enjoys his party. Then he notices Detective McCormac enter Lieutenant Souza's office with a file. He watches them converse through the office windows. The Lieutenant closes the blinds. That only confirms Ari's suspicions. He enters the office and picks up the file. One glance is enough. "I got this one, Lieutenant," he says.

 

Twenty-three years ago, Ari caught a serial murderer. Years later, the pattern repeated. So he caught the next killer. Was the second killer a copycat? The police never released details from the original crime scenes. Now, the old pattern has resumed. Another crime scene. Another meticulous recreation of the original killer's MO. Ari's not about to sit this investigation out.

 

In The One Hand #1, Ram V. introduces us to a detective who never had an overriding ambition to become a police officer. Nor was Ari particular about what crimes he solved. He did the job and never sought the limelight. Yet Ari yearns to answer the question that cast a shadow over his career. Did he arrest the wrong people? Or were the deaths part of a larger mystery he never even suspected?

 

 

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Art

Outside light makes the immense windows in Ms. Halam’s office glow. The blinds cast stripes across Ari's pitted features. He assures the police psychiatrist he's okay. Yet Ari remembers ducking beneath police tape in the pouring rain and entering the crime scene in The One Hand #1. Flame from his lighter and CSU floor lights illuminate the writing on the wall. Lines and blocks form square patterns on the wall. What message did the killer try to communicate?

 

Lee Loughridge lavishes a limited palette upon Laurence Campbell’s art. Glowing signs, windows, headlights, and streetlights turn the purple sky red, yellow, and orange. An unseen figure sprays a hand red. A victim lays slumped, colored solely in red. Ari's precinct seems impersonal, lost in yellow and beige. Orange and red warm Lieutenant Souza's office as Ari confronts his superior. Like the falling rain, the loneliness and isolation of Neo Novena seep into your pores in The One Hand #1.

 

Aditya Bidikar fills white dialogue balloons and narrative boxes with large uppercase black letters as Ari shares why he joined the police. No words accompany scenes of Ari’s retirement party or when he exits the 1950s-style cab, walks past immense Roman columns, and enters the police department. As Ari walks past a display of glowing TVs in the rain-soaked street, the rounded vacuum tube screens shout the news he dreads to hear. The One-Hand Killer Strikes Again!

 

Thanks to Image for providing a copy for review.

 

Final Thoughts

After a long and storied career, a retiring detective leaps back into the fray to solve the case that made and plagued his career in The One Hand #1.

 

Rating 8.8/10

 

To preview interior art see my review at Comic Book Dispatch.