Trista and Holt #1

By Andrez Bergen

“I smile. All coy-like. Can’t trust a single one of them.”

Just smile, smile, keep smiling, shake hands and act pleasant. It’s what they want isn’t it?

Writer Andrez Bergen (Bullet Gal) once again brings his readers into a highly noir based story, but this time dealing with two leads – Trista and Holt. The story sticks you right in the muck of things from the beginning, a scenario Bergen fleshed out at the end with his “Mythological Mailbag”. We spend most of this issue with Trista, and come the story’s end meet Holt.

The artwork in this series will seem familiar to those reading Bullet Gal, as Bergen takes pictures, runs them through various filters, and pieces together each page along with his text. This issue is filled with Bergen’s prose, more so than other comics you might be reading, which serve to tell an insightful story alongside the black and white images laid throughout.

A great example of Bergen playing with the words and images comes from a page with a long stretched column, consisting only of words, beside images of an eye on the left and a character’s incoherent rambling on the right – including the speaker. A great contrast from this page is the one that follows, which consists of a large image of Trista taking up the entirety of the page – which serves as a stopping point for her side of the story. Did somebody say Disco?

An author admittingly experiencing the story just as we are, one issue at a time, Bergen shows once again he has a firm grasp on the concepts of noir literature – perhaps due in part to his readings of Chandler and Hammett (two of the genre’s best), and his consistent great work on Bullet Gal.