Review:
The Cleaners Vol. 1 Absent Bodies TP

The Cleaners Vol. 1 Absent Bodies
Written by: Mark Wheaton and Joshua Hal Fialkov
Art by: Rahsan Ekedal
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Price: $14.95

The Cleaners came out a few weeks back and as soon as I saw the cover, I wanted to read it. Artist Rahsan Ekedal does an amazing job with the cover, showing our protagonist on the front with a trail of blood leading to our antagonist on the back. Very striking and a very good job at pulling in a reader with the cover alone.

The Cleaners is about a group of ragtag for-hire trauma scene cleaners. They clean up some of the nastiest and brutal crime scenes in the Los Angeles area. Ex-surgeon Robert Bellarmine leads his group through hotels and back alleys a washed in blood as they follow the trail of a serial killer who just might be supernatural. My initial reading of the book left me with a mixed bag of feelings, there are some really great aspects to the story but it has some major flaws.

First, let's get the bad over with. One of the biggest problems is that so many of the characters look exactly the same. If two characters have the same hair color, it's impossible to tell the difference between them. There's two groups of characters, one group with brown hair, one with grey hair that I never could tell who was who. It's as much of a problem by the writers as the artist because there was nothing in the story or dialogue I could rely on to let me know which character was which.

Another problem was the story didn't flow well. The writers constantly cut between two scenes during the narration and I can see what they was trying to do there, but it just didn't work. It made the overall story difficult to read and difficult to see how the narration related to the panels on the page. There were plot moments where I had no idea where that character or situation came from, or how it related to the main story, especially with the connection to the main character's wife. And then there's the old man with the razors on his fingers. I have no idea how that relates to the main story, even after going back and re-reading those parts. Plus, I don't think it's properly explain why the killer is dumping the massive amounts of mixed blood. If it's just to hide it's trail, it seems like way to much work to do so.