“A Silhouette of What Should Exist”: Comic Writers Ram V & Dan Watters Are Using the Medium to Their Maximum Advantage

The One Hand and The Six Fingers, an ambitious murder mystery spanning two stories, from Image Comics, is making some bold creative choices by employing an exciting, collaborative creative structure. In an interview with Screen Rant, co-creators Dan Watters and Ram V discussed how their projects connect – and even more crucially, how they don’t.

“Sometimes it’ll be literal. Sometimes it’ll be thematic,” said Dan Watters, writer of The Six Fingers, explaining how the two stories will weave together. Both Six Fingers and The One Hand are five-issue miniseries, with their releases staggered by two weeks. This back-and-forth release structure allowed their creators to embrace a novel, dialectic approach to storytelling, taking advantage of their medium in a fascinating way.

Together, the stories offer opposing perspectives on a murder mystery, as the mysterious One Hand killings resume, and the respective protagonists of both books seek to uncover why, though for very different reasons.

“The One Hand”/”The Six Fingers” Is A High-Intensity Narrative “Exercise”

The One Hand #1 – Written By Ram V; Art By Laurence Campbell, Color By Lee Loughridge, & Lettering By Aditya Bidikar

In The One Hand, the protagonist is detective Ari Nassar, who previously caught the One Hand serial killer, or at least believes he did. Meanwhile, The Six Fingers follows Johannes Vale, a student who has unwittingly committed the latest One Hand killing, and sets out to understand his gruesome crime, no matter how much further into darkness his investigation pulls him. The series promises a “cat-and-mouse game” between the two as it progresses, but as creators Dan Watters and Ram V explained, how the stories don’t connect is as vital as how they do.

“I mean, inevitably, as we get deep into the books, the characters do get closer to each other,” Dan Watters said, speaking in terms of plot. However, he expanded on that, saying that in terms of Ari Nassar and Johannes Vale’s perspectives as the books move forward, “there’s not the assumption that they’re going to meet directly in the middle.” Watters added that this, “was part of the joy of writing these characters and exploring each of them.” Instead, One Hand writer Ram V proposed that this lack of convergence is thematically critical to the story in the end.

Writers Ram V & Dan Watters Explore The “Gaps” Between Their Narratives

The Six Fingers #1 – Written By Dan Watters; Art By Sumit Kumar, Color By Lee Loughridge, & Lettering By Aditya Bidikar

Picking up on what Dan Watters said, Ram V elaborated on the two perspectives driving their stories:

I would in fact argue that they don’t meet in the middle. They come very close, and then right as they’re about to meet – they don’t. And because every bit of that argument has been fleshed out over five issues, when they don’t meet in the middle, you’re left with a missing piece. You’re left with a silhouette of what should exist in that middle.

Ram stated that the dialectic between perspectives between books – including everything from their philosophical leanings to their presentations of seemingly “objective” facts – does eventually arrive at some middle ground, some form of synthesis. That said, it is incomplete by design, as “the synthesis also presents you with a gap that neither of the individual characters can see, because they’ve only filled in half of the argument towards the end.”

Instead, “the only person to have had both sides of the argument is the reader,” Ram V said, “and so the reader can see the shape of the thing that is missing. And I think that is wonderful way to have a reveal in a mystery.” By taking what he called “an interesting exercise…in a dialectical sort of narrative,” and injecting it into a classic neo-noir murder mystery, Ram V and Dan Watters have crafted one of the most engaging Image Comics projects right now: one story, across two books, arriving at multiple truths, or perhaps none at all.