ShareThisIs it a requirement in crime fiction that everybody is kind of unlikable?
That's the situation in Vertigo Crime's latest graphic novel, "The Executor" ($19.99). Virtually every character is tainted in some way, and it's only because some characters are so vile that some others emerge as more or less sympathetic.
Which is not to say that "The Executor" doesn't have an interesting plot. Our "hero," Joe Ullen (and I use the term loosely), is a former professional athlete who returns to his hometown in upstate New York as executor of the will of a high-school girlfriend. The fact that he feels compelled to do so -- treating his current girlfriend like dirt in the process -- indicates he has the genre requirement of A Dark Secret In His Past.
A second mystery is that the ex didn't go quietly; she was murdered. And as Joe begins to dig to discover who killed her and why (while executing her will), he runs into poverty, bigotry, racial tensions (Anglo vs. Native American) and, ultimately, an evil I won't describe here.
Will the two mysteries be connected? Well, duh. Wouldn't be much of a story if they didn't, would it?
Obviously, the by-the-numbers genre tropes hold few surprises to those who read a lot of this type of story (like me), but I was surprised by some aspects. For example, a career criminal comes off as the most sympathetic character in the book. And when I think of Native American reservations, I don't generally think of upstate New York. Plus, the criminal conspiracy underlying all the mysteries is so eeeee-vil that even this jaded mystery reader was revolted.
And I don't mean to be harsh about the predictable parts; I really don't mind when genre stories follow genre requirements. That's why I'm reading it! Writer Jon Evans ("Dark Places") is savvy enough to know he must add sufficiently engaging twists on a well-worn path, and does. And Italian artist Andrea Mutti ("Nathan Never") is amazingly accomplished; his expressions are nuanced, his rendering clean, his characters individual.
Elsewhere:
-- A hardcover collection of the five-issue "Days Missing" miniseries is out (Archaia, $19.95), and it is top-notch science fiction.
Normally, sci-fi in comics means guys in tights waling the tar out of each other. But "Days Missing" is a high-concept, mind-expanding idea -- an old-school, Arthur C. Clarke kind of thing.
The series stars "The Steward," a mysterious humanoid that predates humanity and shepherds species he hopes will someday evolve to be his equal -- not because of altruism, but to alleviate his maddening loneliness. (He had high hopes for the dinosaurs, but ... well, we know how that turned out.) In addition to being immortal, The Steward has the brain-bending power to set the clock back 24 hours when something goes wrong -- creating a "day missing" that only he remembers.
"Days Missing" turns four different, experienced creative teams loose on the concept, with each creating a done-in-one story of a missing day (one team twice). The first story involves a global pandemic, another a cataclysmic artificial life form and so forth. My favorite might be the second story, by writer David Hine ("Detective Comics") and artist Chris Burnham ("X-Men: Divided We Stand"), which plausibly mixes history and fiction for a metafictional narrative about Mary Shelley actually seeing a Frankenstein monster before writing her famous novel -- which, of course, is a missing day that she only remembers in dreams. "Far out," as we used to say.
-- I just finished "Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years" Vol. 5 (Dark Horse, $49.99), and I'm still learning things.
I didn't understand why Marsh was so highly regarded until other fans pointed out that I should be looking at more than the people. I have, and Marsh is indeed excellent at animals and landscapes. But I also learned something about myself, in that having grown up in a superhero-dominant era I have generally learned to adjudge how good an artist is by evaluating his or her people. That training failed me with Marsh, who worked in an era (this volume is from 1951) when a thousand genres bloomed and artists were valued for things other than hyper-muscled men and voluptuous women in skintight suits.
So I have learned to appreciate comics in a broader sense, and that I had a blind spot that needed correcting. Those are pretty valuable things to learn from an old comic book.
(Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncomics(AT)aol.com or on his Web site, http://captaincomics.ning.com.)
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