The Black Hood, or how comics tell stories

(Clockwise from upper
left: Black Hood #1,
Black Hood #1, Black
Hood #1, and Black
Hood #1)

I almost never buy individual issues of comics because I don't like working myself into a state of excitement over something that will take me five minutes to read, then having to wait a month before I can resume the story. That's why I prefer trade paperbacks that compile five or six or eight issues. (Most recently I bought and read the two books that collect the 11 final issues of Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera's awesomely good Scalped.)

Philadelphia's own Duane Swierczynski and his artist collaborator Michael Gaydos compensate for the small number of pages in a typical comic by packing a whole lot of beautifully spare storytelling into those pages. The climax of the opening scene in their new Black Hood series, for example, is one panel, one color, and 19 words: "And as the dark came down over my head, I couldn't help but wonder: Would anyone give a shit?"

That's a lot of storytelling, mood-setting, and existential-doubt establishing for one little panel about two inches high and three inches wide, and Gaydos and the colorist didn't have to vary their palette much; the panel's all black, except for the two little white rectangles where the character's thoughts appear.

As often with good comics, I like the way the two media — words and pictures — play off one another, sometimes together, sometimes one (usually the picture) offering ironic commentary on the other. The Black Hood is something like a masked-avenger tale, the story of a guy, here a wounded police officer, who dons a mask and assumes a new identity before going out into the world to attack criminals, but the first glimpse of the protagonist in his hood is anything but heroic.

And Swierczynski is a hell of a technician and craftsman if he can get the hero to refer to "the 15-year-old inside my head" without even coming close to breaking the dark mood.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

So, which comics do you like?

I'll never be current with comics, because I don't want to pay four or six or eight dollars for something that will take me five minutes to read, then leave me hanging for a month.  But the volumes that collect multiple issues between hard or trade paperback covers are a good deal, as long as they're not too padded with collectible extras.

I was precious close to being late for work today because I was absorbed in a volume of Scalped (written by Jason Aaron, illustrated by R. M. Guéra), some of the hardest-hitting, non-stop dramatic, visually arresting noir in any medium in recent years.

I'm also enjoying, somewhat to my surprise, the first bound collection of Chew. That acclaimed series is about as high as high-concept gets: Detective hero can learn anything there is to learn about any person or thing by eating it. He's cibopathic, that is, and I assume the book's creator, John Layman, invented the word.

On the one hand, the opening stories (the series is up to about 40 issues by now) are cheekily arch and jokey. The first bound collection of the book is called Taster's Choice, for example, and the series' protagonist is named Tony Chu (say it out loud, then remember his cibopathic power). On the other, the jokiness and genre self-awareness somehow work nicely with the story's dystopian universe, in which chicken and other poultry are illegal.

Finally, I browsed a bound volume of World's Finest Comics that collected issues from my day, when a copy cost 12 cents.  Man, that stuff was for kids!

*

Which comics, or graphic novels, do you like, and why? What do they give you that movies or television or books can't?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Deadlier than the mail: A list of books received

I'm suffering a surfeit of newly acquired books. They've come new, and they've come secondhand. They've come from bookshops in New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal, and by mail from authors, publishers and publicists. Today I found a crime novel on the window sill at my local bakery with a sign that said: "Take me. I'm free."

I enter a contest to win a book, my correct answer is not the one drawn, but the author sends me the book anyway as a consolation prize.

They're comics and they're traditional books, and they're by Garry Disher, Georges Simenon, Jason Aaron, Greg Rucka, and the authors I wrote about here. And it all leaves me with a vertigo of indecision over what to read next.

Some notes from my browsing:

• Bang-up openings to new novels from Wallace Stroby and Rebecca Cantrell.

• The latest trade paperback collection of Scalped is blessedly free of the behind-the-scenes gimmicks that bulk up the size and price of special, ultimate, mega, super, premium, prestige, deluxe, and definitive editions of many comics. The reader gets nothing but hard-hitting story.

• Queen and Country: The Definitive Edition, Volume 4 is not so blessedly free, but it's a fine book anyway, with exciting back stories for key characters and, as always in this series, settings recent enough to lend a frisson of immediacy. Espionage fiction exists after the Cold War.
  

But the following, from Crash by J.G. Ballard, may be my favorite of the lot:

"He thought of the crashes of honeymoon couples, seated together after their impacts with the rear suspension units of runaway sugar-tankers."

Now, off on dinner break — with four books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Noir, melodrama, and Scalped

I smiled when I first read that the American movies later called films noirs were once known as melodramas.

That's because melodramas are melodramatic, and noir is, you know, serious. Rightly or wrongly, I'd associated melodramas with cliffhangers, and noir is about endings, the bleaker the better.

Except what could be bleaker than to keep running into bleak endings, tragedy after tragedy, loss after loss, without ever a happy ending or escape into death?

Jason Aaron's Scalped is responsible for my little epiphany, particularly a story in Rez Blues, the seventh and most recent trade paperback that collects issues of this darker than dark comic set on a South Dakota Indian reservation. The story features Shunka, previously seen only as an enforcer for Lincoln Red Crow, a chief and casino owner who runs everything on the reservation. (Red Crow's resemblance to the ruthless barons of stories like Red Harvest is not Aaron's only tribute to the Black Mask-era. One of his protagonists is named Dashiell Bad Horse.)

Give every central and significant supporting figure a doomed quest, with every apparent resolution turning into a new, more hellish species of damnation, and pretty soon the quests stop seeming like excuses to keep the story going and start forming coherent pieces of an inescapably grim world.

As in much noir, the prevailing darkness makes a marvelous, ironic background for the occasional flash of humor. My favorite here comes when Shunka confronts a casino owner whose bad-mouthing has kept the big acts away from Red Crow's casino. The bad-mouthing owner/chief replies:

"So wait, let me get this straight. Red Crow sent you all the way out here to threaten me...over Wayne Newton and Cirque du Soleil?"

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A real cool comic and a real free sample

I've now caught up with all but an issue or two of the Scalped saga, and I can say a few things about the characters and about how the story fits into the noir and hard-boiled traditions. I can also speculate about how long writer Jason Aaron and artist R. M. Guéra will continue this superb comic-book series.

Scalped works as high-intensity noir because every major and significant supporting character is driven by traumatic, unresolved events in his or her past. It works as fast-moving narrative because Aaron jumps back and forth in time, more distant flashbacks always building toward the present, and thus averting the danger of losing focus.

It works as believable, contemporary storytelling because it is unsparing and unsentimental in its depiction of the fictional Prairie Rose Indian reservation, and because its Native American, Asian and black characters can be driven and corrupt. There is little guilty-white-liberal breast-beating at work here. It works as hard-boiled because it's harsh and violent and because Aaron puts wisecracks in the mouths of tough characters at the grimmest moments.

Vertigo has just published or is about to publish Issue #33 of Scalped, and I wonder how long the series will continue in its current narrative form. A number of stories to this point include lengthy flashbacks to a given character's back story, and Aaron will run out of characters sooner or later, or at least risk seeming soap-operalike if he introduces new characters for the sake of giving them dramatic backgrounds. Already, the two strongest characters — the gone-but-returned Dashiell Bad Horse and the violent, corrupt, venal, haunted casino owner/police chief/boss/ex-activist Lincoln Red Crow — overshadow fellow characters given equal back-story treatment.

But that's a quibble. Scalped is one of my best crime-fiction discoveries in recent years and certainly the most unexpected.

(Read Scalped #1 free here.)

***

I've read Scalped in trade paperback collections and regular monthly issues. One of the latter offers on its back cover an advertisement for Star Wars: Space Chicken. That's a cartoon comedy based on the Star Wars™ "universe," but the ad copy makes fun of the Star Wars™ fan phenomenon, with references to nerds and such. The idea of a movie/television/action figure empire so all-encompassing that it can make fun of itself is disquieting. Satire is good. Officially licensed satire seems somewhat worrisome, totalitarian and beside the point.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Red, white and a bagful of noir

I bought six issues of Scalped at my local comics shop this week and was surprised and pleased when I brought my purchases to the cash register to learn that the 50 percent off sale was still on. Then, when I found three back issues of 100 Bullets in the dollar bin, the proprietor let me have them free. Net result: nine dollars for nine books of the best noir being written and drawn today.

(Of course, in my day one could buy nine comics for $1.08. Even nine DC 80-page giants would have run $2.25, but who could have dreamed of such a bounty back then?)

Writer Jason Aaron situates Scalped on a fictional Indian reservation in South Dakota, and if you think the stories offer alcoholism and despair, you're right. But they also offer struggles for power, love, sex and money and, in a brief prologue to one story, a noirish flashback to Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee. Aaron and illustrator R. M. Guéra do a fine job creating a sense of place, in other words. Highly recommended.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Graphic noir: Scalped, Vol. 4

Ed Brubaker's introduction to the fourth collection of Jason Aaron's comic/graphic novel Scalped offers a definition of noir that passes within hailing distance of my own. Writes Brubaker:

"[G]ood noir often has amazingly intricate twisty plots, but that's just icing on a dark, dark cake. Noir is about the characters moving through those plots, ricocheting like a banged-up pinball that only bounces

"Down

"Down

"Down

"Until — Game over. No match, no free play.

"And as you watch them move, you know their final destination, you recognize it ... because it feels inevitable. To me, that's the heart of what noir is, inevitability."

Your humble blog keeper had this to say when he set his mind to definitions (and that definition came in the introduction to an interview whose subject had yet a third definition of noir):

"For this reader, noir hits me hard in the stomach with an ending in which a protagonist goes knowingly to his or her fate. Call it resignation, even if that resignation is sometimes triumphant."

Scalped occupies a thought-provoking place in such discussions. For one thing, its setting on an Indian reservation helps freshen the noir tradition by keeping it surprising and contemporary. Noir is not a style, it's a way of grim life. For another, it's a kind of group noir. Everyone is trapped or doomed, not just some hapless protagonist.

Having said that, one story in this volume, which collects issues 19 through 24 of the comic, has a prominent character take a series of unexpectedly moral actions. I'd like to say that the character turns away from the noir and toward the heroic, but I won't. Instead, I'll take the story as gratifying evidence of noir's flexibility and vitality.

(Read more about Scalped at publisher Vertigo's Web site.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Fresh noir

It's been a recurring motif of my thinking about crime fiction: the occasional work that finds some new theme, setting or technique to bring back the kick that noir and the hardest of hard-boiled used to have.

Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera's Scalped did this for me most recently. Novels by Megan Abbott and Declan Burke had done so earlier. The three works accomplished this in different ways, primarily (though not exclusively) through setting and artwork in the first case, character in the second and action in the third.

What about you? What relatively recent crime writing has found new ways to deliver that nasty kick of a Hammett, a Chandler, a (Paul) Cain, a Jonathan Latimer, a Goodis or a Jim Thompson? How did it do so?

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P.S. I was remiss yesterday in not thanking Brian Lindenmuth for bringing Scalped to my attention and letting me read his bound collection of the first five issues.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Comics, comics, comics

I've spent two days surrounded by more comics than at any other time since I was 10 or 11 years old. And guess what? Some of this stuff is pretty good.

***

As I was saying before I was distracted by an evening of wholesome family fun, Duane Swierczynski and Michel Lacombe's The Punisher opens with a disquisition on spearing a human being:

"Harpooning a man isn't as easy as you think. ... You've got to catch bone. ... Otherwise the hook will just rip away. ... So you aim for the ribs. ... Avoiding the heart. ... Especially if you want your catch ... to make it back to shore."

Makes you want to keep reading, doesn't it? And that's what a good prologue ought to do. Oh, and the first three panels are wordless. Lacombe's art carries the action alone and does so as simply, dramatically and economically as one could imagine: nothing but a rope unfurling against an aquamarine sky.

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Jason Aaron's Scalped both updates and remains staunchly faithful to noir. Updates? The story takes place on an Indian reservation, a category of setting largely if not entirely unexplored in noir. Faithful? The protagonist is named Dashiell Bad Horse, and the tribute to Dashiell Hammett has not a trace of the cute or the nostalgic about it. This is dark stuff: violent, full of the hardest kinds of choices between bad and worse, and all richly abetted by R.M. Guera's dark art work, redolent of night, blood and arid plains.

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Part III of my Great Comics Adventure was a visit to Geppi's Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, a vast repository of American cultural artifacts from the dawning of the mass-media era. That era started earlier than one might think, but that's material for another post. For now, I noted with interest the occasionally dark shadows amid the garish colors and sharp, stiff lines on comic-book covers as early as the 1930s. Noir influence found its way into comic book early on.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008