The One Hand and The Six Fingers, from Image Comics, are presenting readers with a unique narrative effort, not just with how the intertwined miniseries stories are being told, but how their two different main characters’ perspectives work together. Or, alternatively, against one another. In an interview with Screen Rant, co-creators Ram V and Dan Watters talked about what their linked stories have in common, and what distinguishes them.
Ram V’s The One Hand focuses on detective Ari Nassar, who is pulled back into an old case on the day of his retirement, as the eponymous “One Hand” killer strikes again, despite the case allegedly having been solved.
The Six Fingers, from Dan Watters, follows Johannes Vale, who the first issue establishes committed the latest One Hand murder. The twist is, he has no idea why, or how, setting him off on his own investigation in parallel to Nassar. In this way, writer Ram V noted that “technically, it’s two detective stories that we’re telling,” though in radically different ways.
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The Future Of the ‘Whodunnit’ Is Here In THE ONE HAND/THE SIX FINGERS from Image Comics
Writers Ram V & Dan Watters craft an intricate, exciting dual narrative with their miniseries, “The One Hand” and “The Six Fingers,” from Image
The One Hand & The Six Fingers Deliver Two Different Sides Of A Murder Investigation
The Six Fingers #1 – Written By Dan Watters; Art By Sumit Kumar, Color By Lee Loughridge, & Lettering By Aditya Bidikar
In The Six Fingers #1, focal character Johannes Vale commits an impossible murder. “Johannes was a little kid when the last One Hand murders were taking place – so that’s part of the whole mystery of the thing,” his creator, Dan Watters, explained. Yet somehow, Vale – while blacked out and not in control of his actions – manages not only to commit a brutal murder, but to flawlessly replicate the One Hand cipher, the killer’s signature, which was never fully released to the public. This makes Vale’s quest to uncover what is going on just as urgent as detective Ari Nassar’s.
In this way, Six Fingers is “very much an origin story” for a serial killer, according to Watters, but at his core, Johannes Vale is as much a detective as Nassar, the man chasing him. Watters offered some further insight into his character:
He’s younger, and he’s a bit of a nasty piece of work, but I also didn’t want to write – I love writing villains, but I didn’t want to do a sort of hand-rubbing, obsessed serial killer as the protagonist of a book. I wanted to do someone who was more of a detective in their own right. Not in as black-and-white of a way. That’s why I gravitated toward making him an academic. He’s someone who wants to be in control of his life in all times, and has absolutely lost control.
An archeology student, Vale is used to uncovering the past’s deeply buried secrets – but now, his life, and the lives of others, hang in the balance as he determines to understand how he could have committed the One Hand killing, and equally importantly, why he did it.
Ram V & Dan Watters Offer Two Wildly Divergent Investigators, Chasing The Same Answers
The One Hand #1 – Written By Ram V; Art By Laurence Campbell, Color By Lee Loughridge, & Lettering By Aditya Bidikar
“He is a foil to Ari [Nassar] in a lot of ways,” Dan Watters explained of Six Fingers protagonist Johannes Vale, “and they both kind of have the same fatal flaw, which is that they won’t stop. They’re two sides of the same coin in that way.” As Ram V, writer of The One Hand and creator of Detective Nassar elaborated further, their books might look on the surface to be “two stories, where one is a detective, and the other is a killer,” but the narrative dynamic is, in fact, more complex than that.
“Technically, it’s two detective stories that we’re telling,” Ram V clarified, “and so the real counterpoint is not one of intent, or purpose. The real counterpoint is point-of-view.” In a fascinating storytelling maneuver, The One Hand and The Six Fingers share a core mystery, and share the urgency of unraveling it, but they come at it from significantly divergent points-of-view, resulting in a gap in both characters’ understanding of the series’ events that only readers of the ambitious Image Comics storytelling event will be able to bridge.
