It's striking work, but not flamboyantly so. If you've never seen Motter's art before, picture late-era Matt Wagner but with a better graphic sensibility and more rigidly drawn characters. The detective wears a fedora, and you can basically imagine the beats that follow, straight out of the hard-boiled tradition, but filtered through Motter's design-oriented, schematic visuals. 'Mister X: Condemned' also features a detective story, with a search for a killer and all the usual tropes that you might expect. The setting is the character here, and that's not unusual for Motter. It's not a literal maze, of course, but it's the peculiar 'psychetecture' of the city that gives the setting its unique flavor. It's the scurrying that matters, and the maze itself.

Because when you're dealing with a Dean Motter 'Mister X' story, you're dealing with an emphasis that's more about the characters scurrying around inside the maze of Radiant City than about the characters themselves. We know things about him, and 'Mister X: Condemned' has reminded us about some of those things, but he's still an enigmatic figure, even when the comic bares his name. But I still find Mister X to be a cipher.

Mister x comics