Mind MGMT [Shotgun Blurbs]

by Contributing Writer Keith Silva

Mind MGMT
Published by Dark Horse Comics
Creator: Matt Kindt

What It's About: Meru is down to her last dime, delinquent and past due. Her prior success as a best-selling true-crime writer has long since been remaindered to yesterday. Desperate, she decides to divine the truth of Flight 815, aka: The Amnesia Flight. Save for a seven-year-old boy, each passenger who boarded the plane forgot their previous life mid-flight. It has been two years and no one that was on Flight 815 can remember their past. To marry mystery to conspiracy, the flight manifest lists 121 passengers aboard, but only 120 disembarked. The missing passenger, Henry Lyme, has, so far, not been found. Meru interviews survivors only to run down cul-de-sacs and dead ends. Her editor sends her to chase after another chimera in Santa Teresa, Mexico, a sepulchral town as friable and fragile as Meru herself. Where's Mind MGMT in all this? Nowhere. Everywhere.

Why You Should Buy It: Mind MGMT immerses the reader in a world both familiar and foreign. Mysteries loop around enigmas and tie off in conspiracies. Matt Kindt works in a sublime spare style that hides its complexity within the asperity of sketched lines and austere backgrounds. The sublime, subliminal, and just plain weird all make manifest in Mind MGMT. Automatic unpredictability pervades the script. Fights incite fire bombings that become bullets to the head and machetes to the neck; and yet it all fits somehow like a set of nested dolls. Kindt takes a tired mystery and makes it hyper-imaginative. Mind MGMT looks like a simple calculation: A (mystery) + B (conspiracy) = X-Files by way of Lost. When in reality (which is always suspect in Mind MGMT), the equation reads more like A + B = a three mast frigate or a rhinoceros. Take your pick.