‘The Cape’ is a story about Eric, who after years of failure has finally found his calling and he wants the world to know what he can do. This follow-up mini-series to December’s critically acclaimed, and quickly sold-out one-shot,  is again written by Jason Ciaramella and Joe Hill, with art by Zach Howard and Nelson Daniel, as they explore the dark side of what powers can do.

Understand, this book is not to be confused with the thankfully cancelled and awful NBC series by the same name. That being said, I really enjoyed this book. The artwork is really coo;l it is dark and gritty in all the right ways. The story itself may be relatively simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting and it is a great opening salvo to a lager story.

The story kicks off in a morgue where a woman has been brutally killed. Her injuries are so bad they are consistent with the injuries typically suffered by a jumper. Only they don’t know what she jumped off.

We then hop to a hospital where a young boy (Eric)  is hooked up to machines helping him breath while he is having a “conversation” with his brother about keeping how he got injured a secret from their mom (I say “conversation” because the boy in the hospital bed can’t talk and can only do a thumbs up or thumbs down). That secret apparently involves a cape, one the injured Eric asks about cryptically when he scribbled the word -CAPE- onto a sheet of paper when his mom came into his hospital room.

We then come back to the present day where Eric is a grown man, and is being questioned by Police Detectives about the mysterious death of the woman, his ex-girlfriend Angie. Eric is what you might call a person of interest in this case. Of course he doesn’t really do anything to alleviate the the concerns the police have on him.

There is a pretty graphic panel, which is obviously Eric’s subconscious, that clearly displays why the cops are wise to him, and shows us the dear readers Eric’s motive for just a heinous crime. So we have the why (well you don’t you have to read the book to find out the why), but we need the how. How can an apparent loser living with his mom kill his ex-girlfriend in a fashion that makes it seem like she jumped from a 12 story building? Enter… the Cape.

So this Cape (look at the picture in this post, you can see the blue cape with a red lighting bolt very clearly), gives Eric the ability to fly and I’m guessing some measure of enhanced strength. I’m guessing at the enhanced strength, because after the cops leave and Eric throws on his magic Cape, he flies off to the zoo to wrangle himself a Urus Arctos Horribilis… more commonly known as, a Grizzly Bear.

I loved what happens next, and laughed at the thought of it (especially since we here at ScienceFiction.com just ran an article about what super power you might want… HERE), because if you wanted to throw some cops off your trail there are probably easier ways than flying over their car, in this case the  inconvenient choice of a convertible, and dropping a Grizzly right in their unsuspecting laps while they wait for the light to change. That being said, it was original, hilarious and dark and I’m all in for this book and will hit up a couple of local Comic Book shops at some point soon to see if I am able to purchase the One-Shot of the Cape. During the carnage of the bear mauling Eric gets a phone call from his brother Nicky, who we find out was the other party in the previously mentioned graphic motive setting panel.

This book has a lot going for it, I’m a little sad that it will only be a 4 part story. Eric seems like he’s had a bit of a rough life, and the Cape gives him the ability to dish out some of what he has had to take his whole life. I can’t wait to learn more about the Cape itself, and to see just how long Eric can go covering his tracks and what new and gruesome (yet totally inefficent) ways he is able to go about getting away with murder. So come back next month for ‘The Cape’ #2 from IDW.