Science fiction noir pastiche is a popular combination, and it's easy to see why when you get to filter whatever strange new world you've created through that wonderful gumshoe drawl. I read a brilliant Stephen Graham Jones story in that vein last weekend, with Rock Turner, PI, investigating a case that revolved around the souls of the dead being stored in giant crustaceans on the Moon. And this is co-written by Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt, one of whom is sometimes very good, so it could have worked. Alas, mainly we get efforts which sort of make sense as belonging to that overlap, without ever biting: "It's like Growl always said. If you have an energy-scissor, everything looks like a gutter dog." When we get dialogue at all; at least in the Edelweiss ARC, which came in a different format to usual (and was a bizarrely large file), there's one page which was free of speech balloons when I don't think it was supposed to be. Which in turn left me unsure whether the name of the entity which has been bumped off, when that's meant to be impossible, will be redacted in the final publication too, or if that was just another odd production choice, or perhaps a form of embargo. Either way, it didn't really help me engage with the story as it plodded through the usual beats. Visuals come from David Rubin, whose work I know mainly as the substitute art for the latter half of Rumble, and as there he does give acceptable urban weird, but really the only thing here which didn't feel far too familiar was that (SPOILER) after a fair chunk of standard noir antihero behaviour, the lead goes home – which turns out to be a perfectly nice house with a wife and kids. And even that was just nabbing the twist from the first episode of Nurse Jackie, though granted I saw it coming there and didn't here. Another, more central steal is even named in the sketchbook section at the back, and what passes for the twist at the end has been ubiquitous for a decade or so. A comic which would really, really like to be strange, but instead fits very readily into some well-worn pigeonholes.