Elephantmen #51 Finds Mystery In Its Distractions

Writer: Richard Starkings
Artist: Axel Medellin
Publisher: Image Comics

“It should be simple,” Jack Farrell says on the first page of Elephantmen #51. He’s referring to the grisly murder scene he’s standing over (“A Guy. A Girl. A Gun. Blood.”) but he could just as easily be talking about Richard Starkings’ Elephantmen series. What started out as a mascot for his lettering studio has turned into a grand tapestry of all different kinds of stories, all centered around Hip Flask, a genetically engineered human/hippopotamus hybrid, bred for war now earning a living pounding the streets as part of the police agency for creatures like himself. A gumshoe, if you will. Animals as detectives and policemen and businessmen. It sounds funny but Starkings isn’t writing stories but animals. And that’s what makes Elephantmen complicated because he’s writing about people and you can write any kind of story about people.

The first part of the “Picking Up the Pieces” storyline is about murder in more ways than you can actually guess by flipping through the comic. Opening with a mystery, Starkings works to distract us from seeing what’s actually happening. He’s also distracting Farrell and Flask, who both are bringing their own emotional baggage to this case. Even worse for Farrell he has Scarlet, his girl Friday, who is more a distraction than assistant, constantly babbling but occasionally saying something that triggers a realization for Farrell. These characters orbit a murder but the murder scene only acts to bring them together in this issue. It’s another distraction as we never even find out anything about this man and woman who are lying dead on an apartment floor.

Starkings loves to play with genre. The setup here isn’t any difference than countless cop and detective stories, two cops who spend more time butting heads than working together. There are always noticeable narrative roots for Starkings’ stories but he enjoys the execution of those stories as he tries to mash genres and conventions together. He’s told science fiction, detective, noir and war stories in the pages of Elephantmen. Developing characters is how Starkings fills the world of this series. Farrell and Scarlet are new characters but Starkings thrusts them into the issue as if they’ve been around forever, with their own story and backstory already firmly in place. Within the pages of the book, he doesn’t waste any time introducing them or slowly building them up. We’re dropped into their story the same way we’re dropped into Hip Flask’s which we’ve been following for years now. By quickly introducing the characters, Starkings also quickly introduces us to more mysteries than just who killed the dead couple.

This issue dives back into the Blade Runnerish noir atmosphere of the series. Axel Medellin, through his clean artwork and moody colors, creates the mood of the mystery by focusing on the detectives. Farrell and Hip Flask are drawn as characters who look like they’ve seen and lived through everything. It should be simple but these characters have that look of consternation that this is something they haven’t seen before. Throw their own reluctance to be working with one another and Medellin shows us just how complicated this story is going to be. He takes Starkings’ narrative twist and plays with it in the mind games that Scarlet plays on Farrell. The twist may be one of the more simple parts of this issue but it opens up complications that should be fun to watch play out over the course of this story.

Elephantmen #51 specializes in clues and distractions. Starkings and Medellin return to the most basic premise of this series, a hippopotamus private eye, without ever making this a story about a hippopotamus private eye. Like the murder scene, Elephantmen #51 should be simple but stories with characters rarely are. Starkings and Medellin assemble their plot, borrowing elements from classic and recent noir stories, without completely showing their hand. A murder, the relationship of Farrell and Scarlet, the hatred and mistrust of the Elephantmen. There is so much happening in this comic but it’s never as simple as it should be.