There’s a lot of good with all the bad things going down here.
Creative Staff:
Story: Leia Gwenn
Art: Matthew Dow Smith
Colors: Kelly Fitzpatrick
Letterer: Frank Cvetkovic
What They Say:
She’ll need more than a rabbit’s foot to get through this. Cursed at birth, Charlene ”Chuck” Manchester hires out her own bad luck, providing disaster where someone else can profit. She can get you that insurance payout fortune—for a price. But bad luck doesn’t always go as planned, and when Chuck gets stuck between a dissatisfied crime boss client, a cult leader, and a dogged insurance-fraud investigator, things get . . . explosive. Everything that could go wrong does—and only about half of it by accident.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Sometimes a good cover will draw you to a book. With Bad Luck Chuck, I really liked the look of the cover and how it presented our title character. I’ve read a few books lately that come from Matthew Dow Smith and felt that he just wasn’t on the right material, such as the Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay books, so seeing him here on an original work really does click better. It feels like it belongs and he’s got a great take on our title character. Even better, Kelly Fitzpatrick is coloring and that means this book looks beautiful with all that it has to work with and I’m excited to see more. The biggest unknown was Leia Gwenn as this is my first work from her and while there’s some confusion at times with exactly what’s going on, it has a lot of “pilot episode” aspects to it that I suspect will get smoothed out as we know more of the story.
The premise of the book is a fun one as we’re introduced to Taishi Charlene Manchester, a young woman who runs her own “Disaster on Demand” business. While the why of it is not known, her presence can cause things to go bad and create dangerous situations. She keeps a lot of good luck charms on her when out and about in order to tone down or increase the level of bad luck while at her home/office she keeps a lot of things around to help damp it down in a big way so she can exist without the place blowing up. Everything in its place and for a reason. So it makes sense that some would know what she’s capable of and hire her for various jobs, such as just walking through a laundromat that will then spark and catch fire. There’s an insurance investigator that has been tracking her for some time and knows of almost fifty events in the last several years that she’s tied to but can’t be proven because of how her power/curse/ability works.
Where things get wonky is in that she gets hired by a woman to save her daughter from a cult, but the cult must be destroyed because every time she’s rescued she just goes back. This plays out about as you’d expect but there’s the combination factor of some other group that’s looking to deal with Chuck and are trying to mess things up for her themselves. But it takes another turn with the mother of the young woman apparently intent on killing her daughter because she’s worth some twenty million dollars. And we have that insurance investigator trying to nail Chuck for her crimes and looking for evidence, which this event almost provides him. It’s a bit chaotic and a little confusing with the different groups at work here and the sense that some bigger plays are in the works, but it moves forward well thanks to how Chuck carries herself and the general look of things as there’s almost a kind of quirkiness to it that is very alluring in the art style.
In Summary:
With some books, there’s just that “something” about them that really clicks and makes it a great read, even if there are issues along the way. I came out of this first issue having really enjoyed it and wanting to have more of it now to see where it goes and to know more about our title character. There’s a very cinematic feeling to the book that Matthew Dow Smith gives to it but I love the general look of it with the blockiness of certain angles, the heavy inking, and the way Kelly Fitzpatrick colors it so beautifully. There are just panels that make me grin, to be frank. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more of what kind of luck Chuck will have and how it’s going to screw with everyone around her – and her as well.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: March 27th, 2019
MSRP: $3.99
