If you can’t reinvent the wheel, I suppose the only other route to go is to make the best wheel possible (smoothest, not one with spinning rims). David Lloyd’s Kickback is a fairly smooth noir detective story. There are some interesting story elements to it--Lloyd has a nice tangent about airships, which should have been some sort of metaphor but isn’t--but he also relies heavily on genre standards. House in the middle of nowhere, check. Selective amnesia, check. Heroic struggle to better oneself, check. Opening with a lame, recurring dream without enough meat for an actual metaphor, check. Lloyd’s famous for drawing V for Vendetta and Kickback is the first thing I’ve ever read he’s written and he’s actually pretty good at what he does. The dialogue’s occasionally loose, but nowhere near as bad as regular comics, and somehow his art doesn’t match the pacing, but, overall, it’s fine. It’s too short at the end and he doesn’t spend enough time building character relationships, but Kickback’s about the ride.
During this ride, Lloyd relies a lot on his art. There is a lot of purely visual storytelling in Kickback and Lloyd’s artwork--most noticeably in these sequences--is way too dark, way too loose. There are panels when you can’t tell who’s dead and who’s not, there are panels when you can’t discern where people are standing in relation to one another. It’s a murky mess. Lloyd’s art is also a little more static then it ought to be. Occasionally, people who are in motion stand still, creating a disconnect from the experience. These points are relatively minor--relatively--because Lloyd is an excellent artist and Kickback is a fine book. It doesn’t work out perfectly--it ends badly--but it’s still a decent comic book.
The other problem with doing noir is the limit to the genre. A detective story about a corrupt cop can only be so good, especially if it features shootouts. For one of those, Lloyd does a good job.