"Cracked" has Cool carved into its forearm with a Stanley Knife.
The opening draws Meda, our evil-but-wittily-self-aware more-than-human teenage heroine, in a series of fast, confident, blood-red claw strokes that create an image as clear and succinct as a Kanji.
We start at night, with a crazed, helpless girl, waiting in her cell in a run-down lunatic asylum as an evil guard prepares to pay her a visit.
Except the girl isn't helpless and she's a completely different kind of crazed, so soon there is blood everywhere and none of it is hers.
Yet just as I was settling down to a Dexter-meets-teen-girl-soul-eater story, filled with gore and witty banter, new players arrive and the story cracks open into a whole universe of possibilities.
Turns out that all that cool, quietly desperate, slightly self-deprecating, slightly self -congratulatory wrapping contains more complex characters, a mostly-original urban-fantasy universe and a plot that could go anywhere.
I'm hooked.
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