Title: Stumptown
Author: Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 162
Rating: 8/10
Stumptown is a tour-de-force in two disparate subjects – crime fiction and graphic novels. Rucka is the writer, and his exceptional plotting and characterisation help to ensure that the plot’s constantly barrelling forward, but it’s really Southworth’s illustration that steals the limelight here. There are a lot of blues and pastels, and it almost has the effect of looking at it through a vignette. It’s interesting, and a design element that I’ve never really seen before in a graphic novel, but it works.
Broadly speaking, it follows the story of Dex Parios, a female detective with a gambling problem, and the fact that it was originally serialised means that it works particularly well as a published book, because each ‘issue‘ functions effectively as a ‘chapter‘. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book to anyone – it’s awesome, and a lot of fun to boot.