Review by Frank Plowright

Nadia is an actress co-opted for her performance skills to masquerade as a waitress in a café regularly attended by a person of interest in a nation where civil war simmers. A truce has been arranged, but involves separating a city into two halves with checkpoints between them. Nadia’s becoming Miram is to occur in the city’s other half.

Co-creators Maria and Peter Hoey give no indication of a separation to writing and art, and create a sense of otherness from the opening pages. It’s life not as we know it, but as it may have been for someone, somewhere, sometime. The Shadower echoes East Europe’s years of Communist rule and the divided city of Berlin, yet the background is deliberately vague. We learn no more than is needed to understand Nadia’s situation and to set the simmering tension.

Contributing to the suspense is artwork that’s deliberately flat and two-dimensional, a cold precision applied to invoke a mood. People are almost always posed rather than moving, and there’s a minimalism to the surroundings. They resemble reality, but not quite, as places don’t look lived in or used. The effect resembles moving Miriam about in a Sims environment.

C.P. Freund is credited as contributing to the story, but there’s very little to the basic plot and the mood is everything. Despite the colour, this is the comics reconstruction of film noir, underlined by brief dream sequence in black and white, and that’s all down to the Hoeys. There’s a small element of the inexplicable, crucial to events toward the end, which is where a plot kicks in again. The remainder is Nadia’s day to day experiences in her role as Miriam serving in a café, yet page after page is compelling.

Spies, double agents and political activism makes for a potent brew and that’s excellently exploited in a memorable graphic novel.