391 - FCF: The Private Eye

The Cloud burst, and for forty days and forty nights, all of our secrets rained down. In the not terribly distant future world of Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente’s 2013-15 series The Private Eye, the Internet is a distant memory and anonymity is now the foundation of American society. Of course, our hero is an amoral paparazzo-slash-private investigator whose job is to dig up those old secrets; of course, this leads him into a world of trouble. For the penultimate Four-Color Flashback of 2019, Paul and Arlo discuss Vaughan’s clever utilization of noir tropes in the post-Internet age, Martin’s dynamic pencils/inks, Vicente’s eye-popping colors (this is one noir that doesn’t hide in the shadows), their radical pay-what-you-want self-publishing platform Panel Syndicate, and the big philosophical question at the heart of the book: is the Internet worth it?

 

Next: for the final Four-Color Flashback of the season, we get existential with Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s Daytripper.

THE BREAKDOWN

Total Run Time: 01:31:30

• 00:00:22  - Intro
• 00:04:10  - Main Topic
• 01:27:00  - Outro / Next

THE MUSIC

• “Private Eyes” by Daryl Hall & John Oates, Private Eyes (1981)
• “This Masquerade” by The Carpenters, Now & Then (1973)

THE LINKS

 

• Panel Syndicate

 

• “The Private Eye: A Damn Good Comic About How the Internet Changes Us” by Evan Narcisse, Kotaku
• “An Internet Comic About Post-Internet Life Imagines All Our Privacy Nightmares Come True” by Mark Peters, Slate
• “Cloud Burst: A Review Of Brian K. Vaughan’s Futuristic Comic Noir, The Private Eye” by Andrew Jones, Digital America