I must’ve missed the modern technology in the first issue; Fear Case doesn’t take place in the seventies, they just drive a seventies car and artist Tyler Jenkins has a timeless (well, seventies-ish) style.

The issue opens with a quick recap of the soft cliffhanger—one benefit to writer Matt Kindt’s verbose expository dialogue is quick recaps fit naturally—with our heroes investigating the next recipient of the titular Fear Case. Turns out they’re a little too late but not too too late because they’ve got another lead, which turns out to be solid enough there’s a car chase.

Along the way there’s enough time for one of the heroes—they’ve got names (one is Mitchum, sadly the other isn’t Douglas or McQueen or Eastwood)—to start having Cthulhu-like visions since the Case sometimes leads to horrific imagery out of an Avatar Alan Moore comic.

Oops.

Anyway.

It’s solid enough “character development” but since the characters don’t matter it just ends up being mood development; also fine. Fear Case, thanks to Jenkins, is all about the mood. It’s about suspecting the unknown of being knowable; a suitcase causing Lovecraftian horror is a big suspension of disbelief, making the idea of Secret Service agents on a literal mission trip to find it seemingly less absurd on its face.

But, again, Jenkins’s art is there to hold it all together. Jenkins is even able to get away with making the shitty racist guy look like Trump without it breaking the tone.

There’s another—even softer—cliffhanger this issue, with promises of more impending doom next issue. It’s far from a wheel reinvention but it’s also great looking; Fear Case evens out nicely enough.

Fear Case is high concept supernatural police procedural, with some asterisks. It’s not exactly police—they’re Secret Service agents—and the supernatural aspects may end up constrained. It’s too soon to tell whether they’re going to go atomic glow, Gwyneth Paltrow’s head, or full Alan Moore’s The Courtyard in the eventual reveal (or if there will be a reveal at all), but writer Matt Kindt does work in some foreshadowing in the second half of the issue.

The issue opens with an opaque introduction to the setup—two Secret Service agents are coming up on their one year working on the coldest of cold cases—the “Fear Case,” a literal case tumbling through the worst places in history, seemingly with causality (no word on Jesus’s moment of doubt and pain but it seems to have been there when Anastasia screamed in vain and then when the blitzkrieg raged). There’s an exposition dump to the next agent who’ll be getting the case (the Secret Service only lets you work on it a year because otherwise you go mad and end up in Jersey alongside the guy from Courtyard) before the heroes go investigate their next lead.

One of the heroes waxes on about coffee beans (thanks Quentin Tarantino, thanks a lot) and the other likes fantasy books (sorry, speculative fiction so we can validate bad ideas). I think we learn their names but they’re just plot movers, albeit ones with some obvious drawbacks given what we learn about the Fear Case. The second half of the issue—days or weeks before they’re out of the case—gives them their first break.

Kindt does an okay enough job making the mystery compelling, but Tyler Jenkins’s moody, sketchy seventies art is the whole draw. No pun intended. Seeing how he scales from gore to glamour, talking heads to procedural, it’s a great looking comic.