A new crossover crafted by Ram V and Dan Watters is kicking off next week, starting with The One Hand #1 on February 7, 2024, and then carrying forward in The Six Fingers #1 out on February 21st. Carefully crafted and curated to play off one another, I perused both and found something feeling complex in its noir approach to a detective story.
Intended to be read one after the other (read my review of The One Hand #1 here), The Six Fingers is about a man named Johannes Vale. Well-educated with aspirations to take his studies to an archeological site, his life spirals out of control, leading him to murder.
Set in a future metropolis, this story carefully crafts its main character, Johannes, so that he could be any of us, even though he massacred a person. He’s wide-eyed and hopeful yet goes down a path he can’t stray from. The story opens on the murder scene, which also appears in The One Hand #1. The story then switches back a short period to show us who the man behind the murder is.
Some compelling elements are happening here, especially after reading The One Hand #1. One of which is the sci-fi futuristic nature of the story. The Six Fingers leans more into the sci-fi futurism as we see Johannes as his day job. It’s nothing a person would do for work today and involves some toxic workplace elements. At the same time, this world isn’t too different from our own. Artist Sumit Kumar and colorist Lee Loughridge show off a futuristic future in subtle ways, yet the interiors of buildings and clothes aren’t too different from our own. In this way, the world and story are more believable.
A gruesome killing has taken place.
Credit: Image
Then you have the ritualistic elements, which are much more prominent in this issue. The juxtaposition of these elements with sci-fi futurism is compelling, showing us how the mystery ties to the past and takes place in the future. It’s too early to say what is happening, but the idea of a ritual from an older world bleeding into the future is intriguing.
Kumar’s art shines most with the futuristic look of the city and in a key scene at Johannes’ job. This scene is the most sci-fi thing about the issue, showing us a crazy, dangerous job that clearly doesn’t value human life keeping things running. This also ties into something special about Johannes, which may or may not have something to do with the murder.
A through-line for this and The One Hand is color artist Lee Loughridge and letterer Aditya Bidikar, which connects the series well. Bidikar’s hand-drawn word balloons and lettering stand out, especially when word balloon tails trail off the page or go behind objects in a scene. I particularly liked how word balloons connect.
It is tricky to know how to feel about Johannes. On the one hand, it’s easy to understand his situation as he’s humanized enough, but by the end, it’s unclear if he’s trapped under a spell or doing this all out of interest in a discovery. The latter would make him less of a victim and more of a person unlocked to kill. It ends up making you, as the reader, more of an observer of the events rather than invested in character. There are still four more issues to explore further, though.
At its core, this is a story about a person from academia discovering something that only ignites their imagination, even if the repercussions are evil and wrong. He’s not necessarily someone you root for, but his situation is compelling as we ponder if he’ll be caught and what drives him to kill. The Six Fingers is a marriage of a gruesome mystery with the hopeful optimism of a man who wants to escape.
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