cover image The Crow Midnight Legends, Vol. 1: Dead Time

The Crow Midnight Legends, Vol. 1: Dead Time

James O’Barr, John Wagner, and Alex Maleev. IDW, $17.99 (104p) ISBN 978-1-61377-275-1

Slain by the same bandits who raped his wife, raised from the dead a century later by his need for vengeance and the convenient proximity of his reincarnated murderers, Joshua carries out a brutal campaign of bloody retribution against the unrepentant renegades. As baffled cops try to make sense of the gruesome clues, the Native American revenant tracks down and judges each of his reborn killers, thugs who even now are targeting another woman. Just as Joshua’s foes were reborn having learned nothing, so Dead Time recapitulates The Crow without adding anything of value. O’Barr and Wagner revel in their simplistic tale of affronted macho self-regard; as with the original Crow story, women are not really people but merely counters over whom the significant characters squabble; crimes against women are terrible mainly because they expose the inability of the men to defend their possessions. Tediously violent, Dead Tales will appeal mostly to Crow completists. (Aug.)