Taxi, v1: “The Dragon’s Labyrinth”

A woman named “Taxi” gathers inside dirt on stories for her reporter friend to write investigative pieces with.

But, mostly, it’s a beautiful book to look at, packed to the gills with details, but very organically.

I’m going to try to explain this one, but you might just want to flip through the images and skip ahead to buy the book based on that alone….

Stick around for later in the review when I go deep into the art in a couple of panels.

Before There Was Uber, There Were “Taxi” Credits

Taxi Investigates

The sales copy does a decent enough job in summarizing the book, so I’m going to copy-and-paste it here for you:

Beautiful, fearless, resourceful and talented. That’s Taxi. One night, a man named Nelson rescues her from an attack… and changes her life. He works for a news agency called Control Press, and “recruits” Taxi for his investigative team. In “The Dragon’s Labyrinth,” a rampant disease is killing only black people. Taxi risks her life to expose the sinister plot behind this “Black Death.”

I’m not sure why “recruits” in in quotes like that. Maybe it’s because she knew she’d enjoy it so much that she actually volunteered?

The other thing I’m not completely sure about is her relationship with Nelson. Are they a romantic thing or not? There’s no on-panel displays of affection, but they do eat out together often and she takes showers at his place. But nothing is ever spelled out on that front. It’s something that distracted me a few times while reading this book.

Taxi, herself, is an interesting character. She’s feisty and adventurous. She has a dogged determination to get the job done, even when some of her actions might fly in the face of common sense. So, yes, she gets herself into more trouble than she needs to at times, though she usually gets out of it, one way or another…

That’s a handy ability to have in a character for the writer of a comic book, of course.

It can at times be nearly cartoonish, such as the time in this book she rents a plane and flies it solo.

She’s not a shrinking violet, or the Gal Friday of Nelson. She’s always fighting to get the news story, even if it’s just because it’s a good pay day for her. Font draws her in a highly fashionable and beautiful way, but never lets her become an empty vessel to pander to a specific demographic with. There’s a bit of mystery and a lot of attitude and action to her.

Even in the one moment of the book where she becomes maybe a small bit of a damsel in distress (arguably), it’s her actions that bring about a greater resolution to the story. She may not have been directly responsible for it, but she pushed the events into motion that won the day.

The Writing of Taxi

In some ways, this book reminds me a lot of “Largo Winch.” It’s a good mix of action and the dialogue that’s necessary to solve a puzzle surrounding it. You’ll get a six page action sequence to start the book with Taxi dodging gunmen and delivering the package. But then you’ll get the two pages of dialogue to sort out what’s going on and who’s doing what to whom.

And Font can draw those car/plane/boat chases across a city with no problem, using a degree of photoreferenced art with his own linework qualities to make it look less static.

The scope of the action only grows with the book, from the ground to the air, from one character having the clear advantage to getting stuck on the wrong side of a dead end.

Thankfully, though, “Taxi”‘s stories are completed in one book…

Font has some curious storytelling choices in the book. The ending fizzles out a little bit. It starts off as a tense and dangerous scene for Taxi before cutting away entirely to solve the problem with a few pages of thoughtful dialogue and negotiations. And the resolution doesn’t even happen on panel. It’s spelled out afterwards in an exposition dump. It’s the opposite of “Show, don’t tell” and a good example of why that phrase, as cliche as it is, is still the best policy.

Also, after a book filled with examples of Taxi’s ability to assess a situation on the fly and fight or think her way out of some difficult situations, it’s weird that the big ending ignores all of that.

There are a couple other moments in the book where events are told in dialogue that would have been entertaining to see unfold. I’m not sure how much of that was due to the page count, and how much of it was Font using the old writing advice to get out of a scene early a bit too literally.

Lost Opportunities

The big fumble in this book is part of the premise that, when the book was written in the late 1980s, probably wasn’t considered so big a deal like it would be today.

The summary at the top mentions that the illness under investigation is happening only to the black population of the city. That should get your brain going for plots involving racist company owners or suppression of the underclass or margianalized people or any of the hot button topics you’d expect to read about in today’s comics.

But, no, it’s not a major plot point, really. It doesn’t have a huge impact to the events of the book. There’s some lip service paid to it, particularly in the way the competing new network is covering the story, but it’s not really a story element.

It’s mostly an extra layer added on top of a bad crime, but the intent and the results of it are, in the end, covered in one panel and mitigated on the next page. It’s a complication to an action that doesn’t add anything to the story. It’s a lost opportunity for adding more depth to the story.

The Art of Alfonso Font

(Really, This Section Is Why I Wrote This Review)

The draw of this book is Font’s art.

That’s what made me give it a random chance. I loved the looks of that cover. It reminds me almost of a children’s book illustration where the artist took a week to draw 50 things onto a single page. Font did that just with the cover, including all the stuff strapped around her shoulder to all the little things on the desk and the cars lining the streets in the window behind her.

Font is a detail man. He packs every page and every background with things that make it look complex, but never difficult. It all fits together. He has a magical way of separating layers and focusing the reader’s eye, even while drawing panels that look like million dollar movie sets.

There’s something about his style that reminds me of Alex Toth, even though it’s nowhere near as simplified as Toth’s. The ink lines with their varied weights, and the characters with their gestures and the angles they’re drawn at remind me a little of Toth. And then there are the hand drawn sound effects and signs.

I can also see what look like bits of Walter Simonson (or maybe it’s Toppi?) and Howard Chaykin in there, if you look at the right secondary characters from a specific angle.

Font was an old pro by the time he produced this book. So while Chaykin and Simonson were, indeed, tearing up the comics world with their own creations at around the same time, I don’t think they directly had a big influence on Font.

However, the talking heads on TV look straight out of “Dark Knight Returns”…

Font’s Organic Backgrounds

The word that comes to mind when I look at this book is “organic.” In today’s world where Google Images is always available and Sketch-Up can help us draw any building from any angle, art can often look clean and crisp and perfect.

“Perfection,” as the saying goes, is so often the enemy of “good.”

Font’s art looks hand drawn. Nothing is completely perfect. It’s all drawn with perfect perspective, consistency, and anatomical detail, but your eye is never distracted by the perfection of anything.

Let’s take a look at part of one particularly busy panel:

Buildings in the background have character and detail. They’re not a collection of clean, straight lines from slick angles. Font draws them with textures that only an ink brush or maybe a Crow Quill could give you. He didn’t just hold down the shift key while pointing his Cintiq stylus a couple inches over to snap a pixel-perfect line.

Even when it looks like he’s using a circle template for things like the rings around the lights that are on, he adds to it. It’s not always a sleek thin line. Look at the one above on the far right. It’s a wavy, stuttery line.

Everything has character. The texture on the stucco exterior walls is indicated with a couple of squiggles. The busy brick pattern of another building is drawn with various line weights, and without every brick lining up perfectly. There are roof lines off in the distance that are small enough on the page that Font didn’t even pick up a ruler to draw them. They’re clearly drawn freehand, and that’s OK. It helps separate that “layer” of the scene. It also keeps anything on the page from looking too mechanical and perfect.

Notice, also, how the background detail on all those bricks in the building directly behind Taxi are simplified so greatly so they don’t compete with her? Between that and the pink of her jacket, she stands out in this panel.

Here’s another example. This is the last panel in the book. I’ve removed the lettering, but it’s not really a spoiler. I’m just being super careful.

This is a beautiful extremely wide angle panel to show life in the big city. It feels like a busy, lived-in city. You don’t need the tall buildings for it. You need the ground level sidewalks with the trees growing out of them in front of a line of store fronts.

It’s a bit of one point perspective, but Font doesn’t call attention to that. In fact, he puts Nelson and Taxi just off to the side.

Font also draws all the store signs handing in front of each store, as well as some cars off the side, a kiosk of some sort in the middle (newsstand?), a wall covered in identical posters of something or other. It doesn’t have that sterile, awful, just slightly out of perspective and far too clean look of a comic where all signs are computer lettered. Those always pop you out of a story.

But zoom in and take a look at the detail Font does and doesn’t draw to bring this look to life.

There’s so much here you likely don’t see while your eyes read the book panel by panel. I’m taken by that tree in the far back. It’s barely sketched in, just a collection of short dashes roughly coming out of the trunk of the trees.

The buildings off to the left get all of Font’s attention. Look at the detail he puts in right down to the decorative braces underneath the balconies. He’s drawing the signs in front of the stores, from the 3D individual letters in the front building down to the tall, thin lettering on the red sign a couple doors further away.

And then there’s the hand-scrawled “Burger King” sign between the trees (above Taxi’s head) that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, I’m sure. It’s basically chicken scratch to fill in the last square centimeter of unoccupied space that was left.

The people in the scene are convincing, but look carefully at how simply they’re drawn, with brand strokes to indicate the folds of clothing.

There’s basically no detail on the ground, though the coloring of it adds a slight texture. The important thing is everything happening on top of that ground, so getting all noodly with ink lines in that part of the panel would be counter-productive.

The Timeliness and Timelessness of It All

Going by what Lambiek.net says, this book saw print originally in 1987. It’s not surprising. The fashion choices are one giveaway, but the technology is perhaps a bigger one. The cars obviously help date a piece. The SLR camera with its clunky flash is another. There’s one major plot point in the book that relates directly to typewriter technology of the day.

Speaking of plots: It’s almost hard to remember that there was a time before the age of ubiquitous cell phones and an always connected world. It’s almost funny to see the bad guy in a trench coat racing for a phone booth to call his boss to report in.

And let’s not forget that Nelson is a journalist at a news organization with an actual budget. It’s enough to pay Taxi to run around collecting newsworthy documents from confidential sources, and go flitting around the city (and in future volumes, countries) in search of a news break.

The one thing that felt surprisingly both timely and timeless is centered on the news organization. Nelson’s is called Control Press, and they’re obviously set up to be the good guys, pure of spirit and journalistic integrity. They have a rival organization, Info Agency, that looks to have cornered the market on the then relatively nascent world of cable tv news channels. All we see of them is their anchors on a TV screen — a smallish cathode ray tube, of course.

But it’s a couple panels of dialogue about the larger roles of “multinational information agencies” and the ways the news is presented that could easily have been written today as much as they were 30 years ago.

That being said, I don’t know how old this translation was, nor how closely it stuck to the original script. It’s possible it was embellished to give it a more modern spin, but it fits in with larger themes in the book, so I’ll give Font the credit here.

Just read this panel and tell me it doesn’t sound like someone in an argument on Twitter or Facebook today:

Picture your least favorite cable news network or internet social network as you read that panel.

And then see this panel, where the role of large private corporations and their own ways of influencing the news is called into question.

It’s not exactly a Lois Lane comic, but it rings a few bells anyway…

Recommended?

Yes. While I have a couple of issues with the story and the way it’s told, Alfonso Font’s art more than makes up for it. This is a good story with wonderful art on top. Taxi, herself, is a flawed but interesting character, capable of unpredictable things that keep the story alive.

There are only three books in the series, but I’m looking forward to reading the rest of them soon.

— 2019.030 —

Buy It Now

At this time, the “Taxi” series is only available on Izneo.

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