Trent v1: “The Dead Man”

Did you read “Ranger Rick” as a child? Or maybe “Mark Trail”? Here’s the slightly more dramatic Canadian version.

Canada: Lots of Snow and Dead Bodies

Philip Trent is a Mountie. He straps the tennis rackets to the bottom of his feet and trudges through the snowy wilderness just like any other Canadian would. He’s a lonely man with a sad past. He and his dog travel the countryside solving crimes and capturing criminals. His knowledge of the great outdoors and the people of the area — particularly the Native people — help him do his job.

In this book, he meets up with a young attractive woman out of her element, who’s surrounded by hungry wolves. After saving her from their bared teeth, she convinces him to help her find her brother who’s gone missing. Thus begins a trek across more of the Canadian wilderness to get answers, which only leads to clues about greater murders and mysteries.

Is her brother really a killer? Can Trent help her deal with that? And when he confronts the bad guy, can he survive the meeting?

That sounds moderately entertaining, doesn’t it? The problem is in the delivery and in the packaging. Because “Trent” feels like a very safe murder mystery meant for a younger demographic, it’s not going to be my kind of thing. The art doesn’t help. It tells the story well and breaks it down easily into six or seven panels per page. But there’s very little exciting in the presentation. It’s a lot of talking heads going back and forth.

It feels like a book series someone might have handed me when I was 10.  It feels like a story serialized in the pages of “Ranger Rick,” if anyone still remembers that thing from their school days.  This is what they would have classified as a “Boys Adventure” in the 1950s.  There are a couple of dead bodies/skeletons shown in the book, which would be sure to grab attention and delight the target audience, but the overall feeling of the book, to me, is just a tad too juvenile for what I like.

The art is part of that problem.  It strives to be photorealistic, and winds up more often than not feeling flat.  Facial expressions don’t have enough life to them. It feels like a group of action figures walking through the pages of this album.

The storytelling does its job well.  It’s very clear.  But, sometimes, rigorous focus on the truth and the “events” leaves out that crucial creative part where all the excitement happens.

The other big problem is that Trent is boring. There’s not a strong character trait in his system, besides perhaps in being dutiful to his job.  But if you compare him to other similar loner characters like Jonas Crowe in “Undertaker“, you see where he comes up so short. There’s nothing about him that makes me want to follow him.

Recommended?

Not really. It’s not that it’s a bad book. It’s just that it seems so tame and oddly clean. Yes, it deals with murders and shows a couple of skeletons, but there’s not real blood, and even the romantic subplot of the book is chaste. Combined with an art style that feels old, the whole thing just leaves me cold.

Maybe if you had a 12 year old son, he might enjoy it. I have a feeling I would have. I liked things that felt more mature than my age — murder! gun play! crime! — but weren’t really all that crazy.

I’ll give the series one or two more volumes to try, but if it’s more like this then I can safely skip the rest.

This is one of the shortest reviews I’ve ever written on this site.  I just don’t have much more to say past that. Maybe I should have reviewed it with a “Meh” and saved you the other 600 words?

— 2018.052 —

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