The Private Eye

Leave it to Brian K. Vaughan to write a story about a future world without the Internet and then post it exclusively on the Internet. Well now at last this Future Film Noir Masterpiece can be enjoyed by Luddites like myself as well as electronic readers who just want a hard copy.

This Hardcover is 300 pages in the Landscape format (Wider then Tall) with beautiful slick paper and a healthy dose of sketches and behind the scenes back matter.

Brian K. Vaughan for those unfamiliar is one of the best writers of comics our field has ever created. He spent some time in Hollywood working on television shows like Lost and Under The Dome, but has for now returned to writing comics full time. His Image Comic Saga is on the top of everyone's Best List.

Spanish artist Marcos Martin has been knocking us out with his work for both DC and Marvel. His recent art on Spider-Man and Daredevil has been some of the best superhero work since Steve Ditko.

Marcos Martin is joined by partner Muntsa Vicente to produce some visually stunning work with very original and breath taking layouts. The contents of this collection were first released digitally at PanelSyndicate in the form of 10 comics sized chapters from 2013 through 2015.

The story itself is takes the old hard boiled Detective genre and puts a futuristic and fresh spin on it. Our Hero is the unlicensed P.I. who lives in a scary world where the Internet no longer exists because one day the Cloud burst and everyone's most private secrets came tumbling out. Now everyone wears literal masks to hide their identity.

P. I. meets two sisters who hire him and this leads to him unraveling on even bigger conspiracy of immense scale. A Megamaniacal Monster wants to restart the Internet.

P.I. is aided by his plucky teen age assistant and his stuck in past Grandpa. This is a fun a creative ride then can be enjoyed on several levels.

My Highest Recommendation.

I really enjoyed the book, I have always like BKV's writing style. Overall the story and art are great, but that is not the problem, the problem is when the physical copy was made at which ever factory some of the pages were put in wrong, in my copy at the end of chapter 3 there are the last 2 pages of chapter 9 and about half of chapter 10 and after about 4 or 5 pages then goes back in order to chapter 4. Kind of annoying and it made reading it somewhat disjointed. But having said that the story is great and I cant recommend it enough, I just hope your copy is in the proper order.

Private Eye

I have convinced myself that there is a trilemma when it comes to science fiction writing.
Either you have a good plot, or you have a good setting, or you have interesting characters. You can have two of the three, but never all three. The action and the people can be awesome, but usually for me the setting is off, there’s a failure of world-building because the author was trying to tell an interesting story but forgot that the economy wouldn’t really work the way they described it and maybe there’s a handwave or something to make it work. This kind of thing lessens my enjoyment.

That didn’t happen here. In fact, and for the first time I can remember in my readings, in “The Private Eye” the world is the star. In this future, the world has gone analogue after the “Cloud Burst” happened which revealed everyone’s secrets and society decided as a whole to unplug and find the joy in books and records. There is a character from our present, who is by this future an aging hipster with faded tattoos who is the most interesting character in the book because he shows the tension between the world as it is now and the imagined world. Alas, he is just a side character in the larger plot which involves an unlicensed reporter (in this world, the press has combined with the police as the arm of justice) solving a mystery. In the process, the big wall holding the Pacific gets a hole blown in it. That’s what I want to see and read about. The plot, for me, lacked tension that would pull the story forward and the world was the star. I definitely want to see more of this world from Vaughn and company. I just don’t care about most of the characters that live there. It’s an odd tension I’m not entirely used to.

I greatly enjoyed this comic, another very engaging story from BKV that tackles an issue we may eventually face. The topic and approach were fantastic. The quality of drawings were perfectly stylized and apt for the world that BKV was trying to create.

I greatly enjoyed the Deluxe Edition as it felt really good in my hands. Everything to the paper to the extras. I only wish it was a hardback but that is a minor gripe.

I'm more of a Marcos Martin fan than I am of Brian K Vaughan. I have a lot of titles on my reading list that Vaughan writes though, I like him a lot. He doesn't disappoint. In this case specifically I was more drawn to the book by Martin. I ended up discovering a great deal about the back story of how this book developed and it's really interesting. They give the readers some insight to the development by sharing some of their early email communications (between Vaughan and Martin).

The strength of this volume is the worldbuilding.
This futuristic world has some thought provoking commentary on technology and society which makes it an interesting sandbox for the characters to race and chase each other in.
Sadly the majority of the characters seem a little two- or one-dimensional possibly to keep the story light on its feet to keep it moving along.

I've read it on both the electronic and paper format and each has their strengths and weaknesses but the paper copy has beautiful vivid color and is a good enough size to appreciate the scenery.
The landscape (horizontal) layout makes it stand out and the artwork does take advantage of this but not to the degree as I would've liked.
The landscape layout also made the book physically difficult to read since an open book pushes over 25 inches across which makes it impossible to read while on your back, sitting next to someone on a plane, and sometimes just on your lap - having it bound across the top would've probably alleviated this.

I personally struggle to like the comic book to graphic novel format and this volume didn't help my love/hate with them by interrupting the storytelling flow with full-page artwork, albeit beautiful and wonderfully composed, but they still brought me out of the story to try to figure out if that really happened within the context of the story.

I'm probably a little more sensitive to minority representation in media and this book is great in its ethnic make up.
The book probably marginally passes the Bechdal Test in about 6 panes.
The level of violence and gore is probably normal for graphic novels but I found it to be a little misogynistic.

Lastly, the end of the book had some color on the creative process.
I really enjoyed this as I realize that it takes a hell of a lot of work to make original content of this nature.

First the good news: the graphics is breathtaking. Beautiful colors and scenes and a dystopic future beautifully illustrated. The story, though, it's disappointing.There are original ideas, Moebius would have loved the mask theme, but the central premis, intrtnet being gone, isn't sufficiently explained, what exactly caused the "cloud" to explode and how it happened is not clear. Nor is the whole story particularly original or plausible. The Author is doing a much better work in SAGA. And a technology, once discovered and implemented, it's not likely to go away

Solid graphic novel with an intriguing story.

SPOILERS

We’re all (or most of us) BKV fans here, so let’s skip what we already know (he’s a great writer) and get to the gist. PRIVATE EYE isn’t great. Not by a long shot. It has a great premise. I love the ambition of the PanelSyndicate. And there are a lot of nice details and panels in the book. But calling PRIVATE EYE great feels empty when you compare it to BKV books that are great, like Y: The Last Man and SAGA. Frankly, I don’t even think the world basis of the plot makes sense -- I’m talking about the cloud burst and the resulting decision of human kind to forego the web because it’s harmful to how we socialize? Or something.

I actually agree with BKV to that point, at least 16 years after most homes have the web coming into them. But for the story sake this is like guys in the 1950s saying TV is going to rot our brains. It’s a little hysterical and dumb -- it’s almost like BKV equates bad internet habits with melting icebergs, like it’s all one big inevitable apocalypse, haha. That’s not exactly the problem with this story. However that kind idea that kept popping up. (We don’t have Pulitzers in the future, we have Greenwald’s?)

So going from that last bit, obviously the big McGuffin is what a lot of thriller/mysteries are doing these days -- invasion of privacy stuff. But I won’t get into that because it’s pointless to just spoil things.

Despite my reaction, I am a big BKV fan, but maybe he needs to take his own advice and unplug. Step away from the SJW blogs, Brian. Just for a month. See how it goes? haha.

There was a similar problem with his Canada vs America book (which is a little better than Private Eye). At the end of several issues we get to a finale where you’re left wondering, OK, why would any of that happen? Oh, wait, what?

I guess what I’m driving at is as a modern American you just feel ugly, unpopular, and you’re not even sure why (in terms of BKV’s story because he’s not quite confrontational either...I’m perfectly aware of the SJW reasons, but feel free to illuminate in the responses anyway).

I guess it’s cool that BKV is making the effort. I’ll still buy whatever he writes for a long time to come because for me he has earned the benefit of the doubt. Just that alone is a testament to his writing ability. But he had a soft year for plot in 2015 (I didn’t read Private Eye until it published in book form -- though SAGA actually got better).

Warning: Spoiler alert. This is a clever story about the issue of freedom, privacy, the government, technology and the internet. The story takes place in a futuristic Los Angeles after the electronic “cloudburst” in which everyone’s online activity such as internet searches has somehow become public for all to know and see. The world after “cloudburst” has become hyper-vigilant about privacy, where internet has ceased to exist and people walk around in masks and disguises called “nyms” (etymologically related to “anonymous?”) and people use fake names and nicknames in public. This alternative world also give rise to the “Private Eye,” which is now an illegal occupation but the black market for them continues to exist since people still want to find out information about others. It’s in this world that we have our protagonist, a Private Eye who was asked by a client to search up dirt on herself but then was mysteriously murdered. While reluctant to be involved with the investigation after the client’s death, he is pressured by the client’s sister and also by his paid getaway driver (whom later we find out is just a high school student) but also as the story unfolds because of the parallel to his own mother’s death. They soon discover that the dead client was involved with something far more complex: a conspiracy to resurrect the internet with the leader being someone who is very powerful and affluent.
This comic is laden with worldviews issues; it made me think about the issue of privacy, security and freedom. Against the grain of most people today the people of the future are afraid of the internet for its negative effects and violation of privacy. The author here wants to caution readers about the dangers that the internet does pose against one’s privacy with the electronic trails that we leave behind long after our own memory of our activities has faded.
One also see this book being a critique of the response to protect one’s privacy. Here we see a society that can be very impersonal: People walk around the street with various masks, some of which are of animals and others resemble monsters. People are very reluctant to reveal their real names and also live double lives. It’s kind of hard to have an authentic relationship if one doesn’t know someone but only interact with the façade. In an interesting twists the media has truly become “the fourth estate” of government, being the law enforcement arm of the government. They not only investigate crimes but as it turns out they are armed and can legally apply force. It’s interesting to consider that they can “shoot” their cameras towards people and intrude into people’s privacy and also shoot paints to mark a suspect (thereby eliminating their ability to blend in anonymously with the crowd) and of course with bullets. The future’s version of the FBI is even called CNN (with the new words of “Citizens National News”) and if approved by higher ups they can even broadcast things live. Often people criticize the government’s inability to be well coordinated with other agencies and yet even with the media and law enforcement being one, we continue to see their limitations and ineffectiveness that is often faulted against government. One of the more fascinating response to the cloudburst and an attempt to safeguard privacy is that in a world without the internet people use the “Teevee” a lot, which supposedly can only give content but can’t gather information from people. Like the book “Animal Farm” we also learn that with power comes corruption and that the “Teevee” can hear what people are saying also. There’s definitely the question the author raises of whether or not we can trust any individual with the heavy responsibility of giving us information without at the same collecting information about us.
There is also a big theme of consent in the book. We see the private eye getting people’s information without their consent by following them and taking pictures for his clients. With the first client being dead the dilemma is in the back of one’s mind: If one dies, can one get information with their consent since after all, one is dead? But no matter how hard people try both in the comics and in the real world, we always give away and get information without consent.
In our techno savvy age, the protagonist mistrust’s of technology is a reminder for the readers that not everything digital is necessarily good, helpful or edifying. We see throughout the story that the P.I read old books and listening to old records. A lot of this stem from his grandfather telling him as a young child to get the facts himself and to look deeper into things. I think there is something to be said about the way we learn and the repercussion that technology might have on our ability to really learn something when everything is so instantaneous. Learning truths takes time, not just only with the research but sitting down, thinking about it, and “letting it sink in.”
On a lighter note I did enjoy how the story takes place in Los Angeles and at familiar places such as Santa Monica, West L.A, Sunset Blvd, etc. Of course it is futuristic and bears no resemblance to modern day L.A. But here and there, there are glimpses of it being L.A. through the signs in the background. One sees the Hollywood sign at a distance mountain background. There’s still Pinks hotdogs, a famous hotdog place in Hollywood. It makes this story more believable than most future “sci-fi” which makes the author’s message all the more compelling. Finally I must also caution that the book does have some swearing and had things that was inappropriate that really wasn’t needed to carry the story forward. There’s also a few fighting that takes place with guns and knives.