SANCTION

Writer Fawkes and artist Fuso present a graphic-novel murder mystery set in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.

The story, which was first published as five separate comic-book issues, begins like most murder whodunits—with a dead woman found on the street. It’s New Year’s Day in Leningrad,and Det. Smirnoff assigns the case to his underling, the struggling Det. Dimitrovich, who has a history of getting lost in details and “could use a solved case” in his file. From the moment Dimitrovich sees the woman and discovers a torn napkin with a star symbol stuck to her shoe, he has “the oddest feeling” that he’s “seen it all before.” As he investigates further, he learns that she was not a sex worker or a drunken reveler, as others on the scene suggested, but a ballet dancer. He’s convinced that she was murdered, and that she wasn’t the killer’s first victim. Fuso ably ratchets up the intensity with quick cuts between Dimitrovich’s investigation and a shadowy, menacing figure who begins to intrude on the story, as the artist shows him stalking outside of scenes and getting closer to the detectives and their families. By the time Smirnoff begins to worry that Dimitrovich is repeating his past mistakes, readers will be equally unsure about whether the younger man is a capable detective, or unraveling under pressure. Still, Smirnoff can’t ignore the growing sense that there’s more to the case than meets the eye. Later in the story, Fawkes effectively shifts the narrative into a deeper exploration of institutional corruption and denial, when the detectives are told by a police captainthat “murderers like this do not exist in Leningrad,” and it moves far beyond a standard serial killer plot into a commentary on power structures of Soviet Russia in its later years. By this point, readers will be racing through the pages, eager not only to find out the solution to the mystery, but also to understand the hints of a broader conspiracy.

An artfully composed and compelling dive into life and death in Soviet Russia.