Review by Frank Plowright
Starring in 175 novels since 1930 speaks to the popularity of teenage girl detective Nancy Drew, and The Demon of River Heights is the first of nineteen graphic novels by Stefan Petrucha, with Sho Murase artist on most of the first dozen.
Largely an American phenomenon, Nancy operates in River Heights, designed as the composite American small town, and Papercutz publish original stories, not adaptations. This and follow-up stories Writ in Stone and The Haunted Dollhouse were later combined as the Nancy Drew Omnibus, while the first two are also brought together as the first Nancy Drew Diaries.
Petrucha toys with Nancy’s propensity for danger over the opening pages before introducing her best friends and co-investigators Bess and George. They’ve all volunteered to be part of a student film shooting in River Heights, but the mystery begins when the two guys shooting the film fail to turn up at the coffee shop. When Nancy and friends begin investigating, the film equipment is just lying around, and the trio are rapidly menaced by a giant bear.
In novel form Nancy Drew has never been afraid to embrace change, and Murase’s art is very much influenced by manga, with which she certainly updates Nancy’s traditional look, but not very attractively. Murase’s people are very angular, seen in close-up whenever possible, and in simple drawings with basic backgrounds. The result is dull pages, and as she works digitally, Murase can’t resist the temptation of repeating the same illustration with minor modifications, sometimes on the same page.
The suspicious people are lined up, prominently shady rich businessman Canton Angley II who wants to redevelop a location he prefers to keep to himself, while the film students themselves are hardly innocents, and apparently often argue. However, they’re stock distractions rather than people with any substance, and only Nancy herself transcends that limitation.
The Demon of River Heights supplies Nancy and friends as tenacious detectives uncovering the crooked scheme, but the better aspects of the plot are really undermined by the art.
