Insiders Book 1 by Bartoll & Garetta

Insiders Book 1:
By Jean-Claude Bartoll & Renaud Garetta
Published by Cinebook

HIGH-OCTANE thriller action across the war zones of the world is the name of the game with Insiders!

Cinebook are putting out a number of books collections translated from some of the major European graphic novel publishers that feature strong female lead characters and this is one such.

Najah Cruz, or Isabel Mendoza as she was once known as a child in Colombia, is a skilled fighter. Some might call her a terrorist, but she happens to believe she's fighting on the right side, wherever it is she happens to be fighting; for when we first see her she's all guns blazing in Chechnya, some thirty plus pages later she's shoving her own bike helmet in the face of a would be knife-attacker in Paris. In between all that she's become an Insider, for all the world appearing to work for the worldwide mafia but in reality an undercover agent for the White House.

This all happens in Chechen Guerrilla, the first of two books in this collection. The other is Operation Offshore where Najah's activities mainly take place around the African Congo, leaving assassinations in Washington D.C. to fend for themselves.

Bartoll's an investigative TV journalist and filmmaker as well as a writer of fiction - he tends to let the former shade his comic book fiction, giving us a little more research and opinion than is needed at times, when he should let the characters express themselves a little more - they say a lot but we don't always get to know them as people we can care about.

That stated, the mystery might be revealed over time, and the idea of thriller-action, military mayhem, current affairs and high-roller shenanigans moves at such a pace over its 93 pages it might entice teenagers picking this up who'll then soak in the research as background information rather than old dogs like me being so aware of it.

Garetta's art is tightly choreographed, there's evidence of his own visual research, and some photo referencing, sketchy in places but at its best working favourably in a style something akin to Britain's Garry Leach.

He doesn't colour the interiors himself, a different person doing that for each of the two stories in this first collection, but I would imagine he does the covers completely himself - they're far more rendered works and a lot more time's spent on developing the feminine quality of the character without going for the sex kitten look, even when she's still totting a gun... although the cover for the forthcoming Missiles For Islamabad is decidedly sultry even from the little inch or so high sample art of it I've seen.

For further information visit: www.cinebook.com