When last we left insane detective Alan Sirois and his partner (and ventriloquist dummy) Bloomberg, they had been hired to go on a cruise ship with a “solve a murder mystery” setup to try and solve the crime. Little did they know, however, that there was a real murderer onboard. Now they find their cabin invaded by overzealous fans, Alan’s girlfriend Teri has had all of her underwear stolen, and the ship’s doctor has disappeared. Plus, the “fake” mystery has kicked into gear as well. How will a crazy man cope with it all? And how much longer can Teri put up with it?

Actually, Teri turns out to be the key here, as Burns uses her to hold the story together. Let’s be honest: it is extremely difficult to give Sirois any sort of love interest that could conceivably stick around. He’s a complete fucking whack-a-doodle, after all. And in the first miniseries, she paid a price for knowing and caring about the idiot. So when shit starts to meet fan here in issue two, it plays because Teri reacts in the most human way possible and grounds the story. She also begins to let her exasperation with her situation show, thankfully. If not, you’d really begin to lose your own place in the story.

Burns also turns in some nice dialogue in issue two, and brings some funny characters into the mix. The best are a couple that are actually in Alan’s fanclub! And they’re such nerds that he legally changed his name to Jean-Luc Picard. He also throws some cleverness into the mix as far as how the danger plays itself out, throwing a nasty curve at Bloomberg that I wished had worked a bit better. These things alone make issue two a much stronger effort than issue one, but when you throw in some improved artwork out of Eisma, I walked away from this one with a much better feeling than I did after number one.

Marc Mason