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 2009Labels: comics, crime, Ed Brubaker, graphic novels, Jason Aaron, R.M. Guera, Scalped
