Jim Sergeant’s very bad, no good, retirement…

Immortal Sergeant
Created by Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura
Editor: Joe Illidge
Assistants: Daniel Alías; Fukuko Furugen; Chihiro Inoue; Kays Kadar; Eri Kageyama; Christina Triana

Jim ‘Sarge’ Sergeant has officially retired, presumed to be off to ‘play golf all day and chase tail all night’ by his colleagues. If only that were true.

Immortal Sergeant takes us on a day in the life of Sarge as he tries, and fails, to let go of his past failures, actually take care of himself and envision what his life will be like now that he’s no longer a police officer. It’s not a great day. Sarge is clearly haunted by an unsolved case involving a little girl and spends his first day of retirement going from one location to the next, getting hammered. This is a man carrying a lot of pain around and it’s destroyed every aspect in his life, though not as much as it probably should have: his ex-wife still drops off healthy meals for him to eat; his children are still speaking to him and, if he were ever to pull himself together a new love could be standing right in front of his face.
However there’s two huge problems he’ll have to deal with if he wants to move on: getting over his own self-destructiveness (driving drunk is never the sign of a stable mind) and, seemingly unknown to him, his potential immortality.

Creators Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura have created an intriguing first issue that doesn’t lay everything out at once, instead choosing to parse out information in bits and pieces while using imagery to say the things that we aren’t being told. This very much feels like starting a good murder mystery where you don’t want to skip to the end because the journey is definitely going to be half the fun.


The artwork is interesting. Very manga and anime-esque and while that particular style can be off putting to some, myself included, for this story it works.

Overall I’m very much looking forward to the next issue and finding out just how bad things are going to get for Sarge and everyone who gets caught in his wake.

4.5 Pocket-watches out of 5