Dark Goodbye, Volume 1 (Dark Goodbye manga)

Hired to locate a missing girl, Detective Max "Mutt" Mason discovers deeper malignant forces at work. Femme fatales soon give way to strange creatures older than humanity, all bent on remaking our world as their own. Mason wants answers, but the solution to this mystery may lie within hidden realms no man was meant to behold...

From Publishers Weekly

Private eye Max "Mutt" Mason is enlisted by the sultry Lavinia Tillinghast to locate her errant twin sister, a mystery woman with secrets to spare. He soon finds himself thrust into an unimaginable sequence of events that, if unchecked, will lead to the return of arcane elder gods and the end of the world. Mason's investigation is fraught with chilling family secrets, corpses—both eviscerated and resuscitated— and a full slate of other obscure happenings: kidnappings, giant carnivorous plants, women unwillingly sacrificed to the lusts of extra-dimensional horrors and the resulting half-human offspring of those unions. With its Leviathan-sized tentacled wigglies, diabolic rituals, tough guy fisticuffs, books of forbidden knowledge and even a creepy asylum, this heartfelt geekfest merrily blends the genres of crime noir and H.P. Lovecraftian horror fiction. Marraffino's homage-drenched script shamelessly piles on the clichés and in-jokes (the most groan-inducing of which is a secretary named "Miss Katonic"), while Rausch's jittery artwork achieves the perfect balance between the cartoony and the outright disturbing, resulting in an enjoyable romp. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The first frame shows a buoy in a big-city harbor; the next, some tall buildings; the next, a shorter commercial building, a shadow in a third-floor window. At the raised sash, we meet Max "Mutt" Murphy, PI, involuntarily bowing. Max likes his Scotch, y'see. A prospective client, a looker, shows up, and Max takes the case of finding her missing sister, who's possibly with her personal physician, Dr. Akeley. He finds her, alright, and much more he hadn't bargained for. The name Akeley and a periodically glimpsed comic book entitled Necronomoman tip off omnivorous pulp fans that this is a Lovecraft parody as well as a noir parody. While Marraffino is no slouch at tough-guy snappy comebacks and portentous innuendos, the star of this series opener is Rausch, who makes the book a disorienting visual extravaganza by merging the wriggling baroque textures of graveyard-humor cartoonist Gahan Wilson, the splatter effects of horror-comics artist Basil Wolverton, the eccentric perspectives of expressionist cinema and Russian constructivist photography, and a lantern-jawed trace of Dick Tracy. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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