We’re in the home stretch!
Creative Staff:
Story: Anthony Del Col
Art: Joe Eisma
Colors: Salvatore Aiala
Letters: Crank!
What They Say:
Issue 4: Who tried to kill Nancy Drew? As Nancy dives deeper into the underbelly of her hometown she discovers skeletons she never expected to find, and an enemy in the least likely of places.
Issue 5: When it rains… it pours. And then rains some more. Then snows. Nancy and the Hardy brothers get closer to discovering Nancy’s killer, but in order to do so they need to dive into the depths of small-town River Heights – literally and figuratively. The penultimate issue in this noir series perfect for fans of Riverdale, Nancy Drew and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Being dead is exhausting enough, but Nancy Drew is burning the candle at both ends, trying to discover who “killed” her. Ditching the Hardy Boys, she goes after her number one subject: Maryanne Bobsey. Her husband once ran the Syndicate, her kids are entitled douches, and—worst of all—she’s dating Nancy’s father.
So perhaps Nancy’s feelings on the matter aren’t that clear, and she might be running on more than just deductive reasoning. She follows Maryanne to a diner where she meets with a mysterious man and then tails them. Exhaustion kicks in, though, and she falls asleep at the wheel. Thankfully, the Hardys find her and take her back to their trailer. Once Nancy wakes up, the boys accompany her on a stakeout, leading to a hardware store and an Eyes Wide Shut-type party. Realizing Maryanne isn’t home, Nancy heads to the Bobsey estate to dig up dirt, only to discover that Maryanne isn’t the person behind the hit at all. Issue four ends with Nancy’s old friend George saying that she knows who’s actually behind the assassination attempt, but spoiler alert, she actually doesn’t.
Issue five has Nancy and the boys delving deeper into the seedy underbelly of River Heights. It turns out the Syndicate is making a comeback, and is doing so through illegal opioid distribution. Our amateur sleuths follow the trail, and there are more revelations and disappointments in their investigation, and more people learn that Nancy is alive, including her old beau Ned Nickerson—a fact that really grinds Frank’s gears. Frank and Nancy bicker, almost ruining their sting operation. The operation does go south, but not necessarily because of the in fighting, and the issue ends with someone else declaring that they know who put the hit out on Nancy.
The same cliffhanger ending for both issues doesn’t really work. It feels contrived and misleading. Maybe I’d feel differently if I hadn’t read these two issues back to back, but it just comes off as a cheap attempt at a cliffhanger.
Again, my issue with the series is that it’s forcing a template onto the traditional Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys stories that just doesn’t fit. Both series function as cozy mysteries whose purpose lie in the puzzle itself. The Death of Nancy Drew operates as a hardboiled detective story with Noir elements, and even though that is a subgenre or perhaps adjacent genre to mystery, it works under a different rule set and achieves a very different effect. It’s sad to see all of these morally gray areas introduced into these beloved series, and it’s sad to see Nancy and the Hardy Boys transformed into hardboiled detectives. It all feels like edgelord, grimdark manipulation done for shock value or to help the mutual series “grow up.”
Of course, your mileage may vary in this regard. I’m sure there are readers who are delighted at the recontextualizing of these characters, and the sort of genre mashup of classical detectives in a hardboiled story, and that’s perfectly fine. Structurally, the story in the past five issues has been mostly sound, and draws from both traditional mystery and hardboiled crime. There are clues, red herrings, and misdirections. There are morally gray characters, fallen characters, and even a femme fatale of sort. The elements are there and reasonably well used, but the story does suffer from the repeated cliffhanger of “I know who tried to kill you” and some issues that go along with the comic format.
For example, I had a very hard time figuring out whose thoughts we were reading in the captions, especially in issue five. Sometimes it seemed to be George, sometimes Frank, sometimes Nancy, and, well, you get the point. Also, while the art is serviceable, it’s also rather basic, with very little weight or dimension. It gets the job done, but there’s little pleasure in looking at it, I’m sorry to say.
In Summary:
Issue six is the final one in this series, so I’m going to make a Carnac-like prediction: the story is going to indicate that it was Nancy’s father who put the hit out on her, but it will actually turn out to be Ned. We’ll see if I’m correct. Despite the fact that I teach a class on mystery, I’m not terribly good at figuring out whodunit.
As for these two issues, I think some will enjoy it, but hardcore Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys fans won’t find much here to their liking. Dr. J gives this a…
Grade: B-
Age Rating: Teen +
Released By: Dynamite
Release Date: Issue 4: September 20, 2020; issue 5: October 7, 2020
MSRP: $3.99 apiece
