MonkeyBrain Comics’ ‘High Crimes’ #1 Review and Creator Interview

Overview

Release Date: January 30, 2013

Synopsis: With Everest looming, Haskell Price and Zen Jensen make a business out of retrieving bodies from the summit. Unfortunately, their latest corpse doesn't belong to any old climber. Things are about to get very messy for everyone.

Publisher: Monkeybrain

Writer: Christopher Sebela

Artist: Ibrahim Moustafa

Story

9.5

Art

9.75

Dialogue

9.5

Pace

9.5

Total Score

9.6

9.6/ 10

User Rating

4 total ratings

8.5
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Positives

Intrigue and drama that quickly sucks you in.
Lovely art.

Negatives

I got nothing. This is a fantastic debut issue.

Posted January 30, 2013 by Andrea Shockling

Full Review

New MonkeyBrain Comics series “High Crimes” debuts with more beautifully rendered crime and intrigue than you can shake a severed limb at.

For the past week, writer Christopher Sebela has been previewing bits and pieces of his new MonkeyBrain Comics series “High Crimes” with artist Ibrahim Moustafa. (And if you aren’t following Sebela on Twitter already, you should be. I’ve mentioned before about how funny he is on The Internet. While you’re at it, hit up Moustafa as well.) The promos have been dynamic and enticing…in the way that only severed hands and blacked out text can be.

Even so, I didn’t really know what to expect from “High Crimes”. Something about a mountain. And crime, definitely crime. That severed hand again. Agents, but of what? I actually didn’t read the solicits, (I guess that means the Tumblr campaign worked, guys) so I came at this first issue with just honest excitement about what on earth (mountain?) Sebela and Moustafa had in store.

Let’s find out.

“High Crimes” opens 28,894 feet above sea level on the southeast ridge of Mount Everest. There’s a dead guy, Sullivan Mars, and a live guy, Haskell Price, at the start of a beautiful relationship. They exchange numbers, make plans to hang out later…just kidding. Price cuts off Mars’ hand (ohhhhh) and we’re off. (I guess now is as good a place as any to mention that even though MonkeyBrain Comics has a wonderful selection of all ages books, this isn’t one of them. If you couldn’t tell already, there’s violence and language that’s definitely inappropriate for kids. Just saying.)

We jump down (Literally. Ha.) to Katmandu and meet Zan Jensen, failed Olympic snowboarder. She and Price are partners in the business of retrieving the bodies of climbers from the summit. I didn’t know that was a thing, to be honest. I assume most of you have the same vague awareness of Everest and its dangers that I do, and I definitely know that those who die on the mountain tend to stay on the mountain, so the idea of…can we call it a racket if they actually do get the bodies?…of a business built around such a morbid opportunity is kind of intriguing. (But this deadly Everest stuff is still very scary and very real. Artist Ibrahim Moustafa told me Chris Sebela gave him a copy of “Into Thin Air” as part of his research for drawing this comic. I shivered just reading the description.) I really liked the way this expository information was presented, by the way. We see Price getting a series of voice mail messages, just enough of an aural snippet to illustrate the nature of the job. And Moustafa’s panel layouts and close ups are wonderful.

There’s no disputing Jensen’s life is a mess. She’s hiding from her past and hiding from her future, even though she calls climbing Everest her “golden ticket” out. There’s obviously a helluva backstory waiting to be shared, what with the Olympics and the drugs and the moving to Nepal, so I hope in future issues of “High Crimes” we get some more details. Price passes the prints from Mars’ hand to a police contact for identification and then everything goes sideways.

The final two pages of “High Crimes” #1 leave the mountains behind for something even more sinister. Sullivan Mars wasn’t just another climber. Sullivan Mars was a man of many talents and many secrets, and his former employer has been tracking his disappearance for two decades. With ~~eight~~ seven agents at his disposal, the man in charge orders them to scrub the scene, since “anyone who knows [Mars'] name is a liability.” That means Jensen and Price, most definitely. Poor Zan. I’m pretty sure your messy life is about to get a whole lot worse.

Now, because this is a brand new series from MonkeyBrain Comics, I wanted to give you all a little more incentive than the wicked cheap 99¢ cover price to check it out at Comixology. I had the chance to talk with Chris Sebela and Ibrahim Moustafa to find out about their creative process and what else might be coming down the “High Crimes” pipeline.

Geek Smash: I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about where this collaboration came from. I know you’re both in Portland and I’m assuming you’ve probably even hung out in person, but I *think* this is the first time you’ve worked together. What brought that on?

Chris Sebela: This collaboration came totally out of the blue, through the machinations of all sorts of fate-y elements. I’d pitched “High Crimes” to MonkeyBrain back when they were about to launch their first wave of books and Chris [Roberson] and Allison [Baker] seemed to dig it, so then I had to find an artist. A month or so later, I was lamenting to my friend Joe Keatinge about my lack of artist and he mentioned Ibrahim, who he shared studio space with at PDX’s Tranquility Base. So we headed over there, Joe made the introductions and we got along great and within a day or two of me sending Ibrahim the pitch, he was totally on-board. Basically, if I hadn’t invited Joe out for pancakes, we wouldn’t be sitting here.

Ibrahim Moustafa: I asked Joe if he knew anyone who was looking for an artist, and told him that, specifically, I’d LOVE to draw a crime story, as it’s my favorite genre. Joe said he’d keep an ear to the ground, and about a week or two later, he brought Chris to the studio and introduced us. Chris gave me the pitch, and the story was brilliant. It was exactly the type of thing I’d been wanting to do, and we’ve been busting our humps ever since. Chris has been a dream to work with. I couldn’t ask for a better collaborator.

GS: Talk to me a little bit about the blitzkrieg promos you’ve been running this week. Will you both look for a dialogue with readers via social media or will it be mostly a place to showcase upcoming issues?

CS: Those were a last-minute sort of thing. I’m super self-conscious about promotion and not cluttering up people’s social networks with ploys to buy my books. So I was driving around, realized it was a week until the book launched and thought up the concept of doing these promotion pieces to count it down, with the number hidden in the art, as a kind of fair trade. We shill, but we bring something to the table with us. And this way we could highlight stuff the book is about without giving everything away and still cloaking the book in a bit of mystery. I am all about dialoguing with readers on as many platforms as they want to engage, and as we go on, we’ll be posting process stuff, research bits, long rambly stuff from me and new promotional images for each new issue.

IM: The promos were all Chris. He’s got a great eye for design. I think we’re both really looking forward to having a dialogue with readers. Our Facebook page for the book, and our respective Twitter accounts are great ways to get in touch with us. Chris has also set up an email address for a letters column that we’re planning to run in the end pages of each chapter. We’d love to hear people’s thoughts, recommendations for good crime stories (in any medium), good cookie recipes, hopes and dreams, etc.

GS: How much is planned for this series? Do you have it all mapped out?

IM: I’m going to defer to Chris on this one. It’s just one big haze of drawing for me

CS: It’s all planned. In as much as you can plan something like this. We’re pretty ambitious about the story we want to tell and there’s a lot of puzzle pieces we’re juggling, so while we know where we want to end up, how we get there might change between now and the final curtain.

That’s it from me, friends. Go check out “High Crimes” #1 from MonkeyBrain Comics, available for 99¢ only through Comixology. Come back here and tell me what you think, chat me up on Twitter, or go directly to the source at MonkeyBrain Comics.

MonkeyBrain Comics

Andrea Shockling

Andrea Shockling has been reading comics for 20+ years, working as an artist for 15+ years, writing on the internet for 10+ years and raising her son for 7+ years. She is an expert at none of these things, but she sure does enjoy talking about all of them. She lives in the Bay Area with her family and eats a lot of vegetables.