Review by Frank Plowright

Lauren Greene’s life has been upended. She quit Detroit’s police force on principle, but the only job she’s been able to get is cleaning up at a fast food franchise. Her mother also works as a cleaner, but at tech development company ARPC, where she’s had a few problems, causing armed thugs to turn up at her door, sent by the company’s CEO. As seen in Vol. 1, her mother not being entirely truthful about the circumstances has caused a fallout with Lauren.

The reason for much of what’s happened is that Patty has taken an intelligent, shapeshifting artificial lifeform from ARPC. It responds to her needs, and Patty believes it’s learning from her. Naturally enough the tech company want their property back, hence resorting to threats and intimidation.

Despite Von Allan filtering in both SF and action thriller plots, the appeal of Wolf’s Head is the cast, strongly characterised with everyone’s motivations clear. Lauren remains central, with the opening pages suggesting we don’t know her as well as we thought, but caring and willing to take whatever action is necessary.

While largely stylistically consistent, there are still a few rough spots to the art, with a couple of big impact pages suffering in particular. However, as before, a lot of work is crammed into pages with small panels almost always showing people as full figures.

Keep an eye on the dates Von Allan includes with the narrative captions, as time is important to the scheme of things, particularly with how this volume plays out. Allan’s very good at raising expectations among readers then confounding them. There’s a sea change to circumstances ending this volume, and you’re going to want Vol. 3.

The first three Wolf’s Head paperbacks originally appeared in hardcover as We All Want to Change the World.