I Reads You Review: BAD MEDICINE #3

BAD MEDICINE #3
ONI PRESS

WRITERS: Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir
ART: Christopher Mitten
COLORS: Bill Crabtree
LETTERS: Douglas E. Sherwood
28pp, Color, $3.99 U.S.

Bad Medicine is a new comic book series from the husband and wife writing team of Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir and artist Christopher Mitten (Wasteland). Weir described Bad Medicine (which is published by Oni Press) as “a sci-fi/horror medical procedural” that focuses on a team put together by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to “investigate strange diseases and outbreaks that science can't explain.”

Bad Medicine #3 (“Killing Moon” Part 1 of 3) opens after the first strange case, and Dr. Randal Horne gets his next one. Apparently, a police officer shot a rampaging werewolf-like creature in Portland, Maine. NYPD Detective Joely Huffman, glad to get away from the drama at work, tags along with Horne’s team. At the Portland Police Department, they find Officer Wilensky, who shot the werewolf, in distress over the shooting and the subsequent investigation. The team also discovers that the other possible eyewitness to the attack is uncooperative. The investigation takes the team to Deer Falls, a nearby small town where the citizens seem to love the place too much to ever leave.

I can happily say that the first story arc (the two-part “Unseen”) of Bad Medicine was not a fluke, and it seems that the series can remain consistent with the beginning of a second intriguing arc. Bad Medicine reads like a blending of elements of The X-Files, “Fringe,” and “CSI,” but the strongest element about the series is the cast.

However, with this third issue, I find myself having a problem with the series. Most of the first chapter of “Killing Moon” is a set up for the rest of the story. The real meat of this werewolf story comes later, so $3.99 (before tax) is simply too much to pay for the 22-pages of the set-up of a story. Of course, I realize that this is an industry-wide problem. Perhaps, the publisher wants Bad Medicine to be a monthly, but maybe publishing the story arcs as a series of one-shots would give better value for the readers’ money.

B+

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux