Catching Up with Vertigo Crime: "Noche Roja," "Rat Catcher," "Dark Rain," "The Green Woman," and "A Sickness in the Family"

Spinetingler recently announced their nominations for Best Crime Comic/Graphic Novel of 2011. Two of their nominees came from Vertigo Crime: Jon Evans and Andrea Mutti’s The Executor and Mat Johnson and Simon Gane’s Dark Rain. Both are highly recommended graphic novels. On the occasion of their nominations, Pulp Serenade is looking back at some of the recent Vertigo Crime offerings.

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Noche Roja, written by Simon Oliver with art by Jason Latour, heads south of the border for a strong dose of socially conscious noir. Eleven years ago, Jack Cohen was a border cop, but something happened that made him quit and has haunted him ever since. Now he sells burglar alarms back in the US. But when he is asked to go back into Mexico to investigate the brutal murders of six young women from the maquiladoras, Jack finds himself knee-deep in the vice and corruption he tried so hard to leave behind. In his own words: “Eleven years of letting the past kick me in the balls. And it ain’t over yet.”

The horrors of Noche Roja are uncomfortably real and familiar. Political corruption and human exploitation are sad staples of daily news reports, and Noche Roja reminds us of the personal tragedies and human cost that is often obscured by cold headlines and objective reporting. Simon Oliver’s prose is unflinching and unsentimental, and the halftone-style of Jason Latour’s art mimics the texture of newspaper photos, reminding of the real-world connection of the story that lies in every panel.

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Rat Catcher is another realist graphic novel in the same vein as Vertigo’s excellent The Executor (which still stands, in my opinion, as the best in their lineup thus far). The book opens in the Badlands of West Texas where an FBI safehouse is burning to the ground. A key witness in a federal case lay dead in the house, the latest in a series of assassinations attributed to the mythical “Rat Catcher.” Stumbling out of the flames is a man with a bullet hole through his shoulder. He’s the only one that knows the whole story, and Special Agent Moses Burdon won’t give up until he’s caught the mysterious survivor.

Author Andy Diggle and artist Victor Ibanez have crafted a blistering thriller as ruthless as the desert sun. Rat Catcher has the pacing of a top-notch action movie and explosions and shoot-outs to rival anything on the modern screen. If any of the Vertigo Crime titles should make it to Hollywood, Rat Catcher gets my vote.

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Written by Mat Johnson with artwork by Simon Gane, Dark Rain is a post-Katrina story of crime and redemption. Dabny Arceneaux used to be a customs officer and Emmit Jack used to be a bank clerk. They both got caught with their hands in the till and were sent to prison where they were cell mates. Now that they’re out of jail, they’ve got no hopes for employment. But when Katrina strikes New Orleans, the pair see an opportunity to get revenge and get rich.

Simon Gane’s artwork is boldly stylized in blue and grey, washing out the color boundaries between the characters and drowning them in the same river of human tragedy. Mat Johnson’s story skillfully balances an exciting heist story with a moving, compassionate portrait of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Amidst such harrowing circumstances, Johnson and Gane show both the worst and best aspects of people. As Dabny says, “We can do the wrong thing. But at least we can try and do it for the right reasons.” Morality is rarely black and white. Such ambiguity is perceptively captured by the writing and art of Dark Rain.

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Peter Straub and Michael Easton’s The Green Woman features radiant artwork by John Bolton. The story belongs to the world of Straub’s “Blue Rose Trilogy,” which includes Koko (1988), Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993). Not having read those, The Green Woman was very disorienting for me to read. Perhaps fans of Straub’s would find more of interest in its story about a serial killer hiding out in a haunted tavern and the cop that is tracking him down.

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Denise Mina's A Sickness in the Family, with art by Antonio Fuso, is a macabre family portrait as grisly as it is funny. The Ushers comes into a large sum of money after the sale of the family business. As greed starts to corrupt everyone fantasies, family members begin dying in uncannily violent ways. Among the most original and distinctive books in the Vertigo Crime family, A Sickness in the Family delights in exploring the darkest recesses of the Usher household, and its story goes in many surprising directions.

Gordon Harries, over at Needle Scratch Static, wrote a terrific review of A Sickness in the Family: “Denise Mina and Antonio Fuso’s neo-gothic is, for my money, the best graphic novel that Vertigo Crime has yet published. It is dark, violent, funny, profane and profound about the psychological hinterlands that our families tend to occupy. Not only will it, as Greg Rucka promises in his blurb ‘leave you walking with its echoes for days to come,’ you’ll find yourself marveling over a clever (seemingly throwaway) line of dialogue and re-assessing the book’s content every time you think of its ending. It’s that good.”

"Fogtown" by Andersen Gabrych and Brad Rader (Vertigo Crime, 2010)

Fogtown is Noir.

Noir to the core. Raw, bleak, brutal, and compelling as hell to read.

Frank Grissel is a self-loathing, slumming Private Eye named with enough personal baggage to drown himself in the gutter. His investigation into the disappearance of a young prostitute named Carmen leads him into the more unappealing aspects of San Francisco circa 1953. The local priest seems to be hiding something, and the sexy “sex psychologist” Dr. Grey has more invested in local prostitutes than just research. But to find the girl and solve the case, Grissel will have to plumb the worst parts of society and admit to a lot of things he’s been drowning in alcohol and running from his whole life.

Written by Andersen Gabrych with art by Brad Rader, Fogtown is marks another triumph for DC Comics’ Vertigo Crime series. It is also the grittiest of the bunch. Whereas some of the earlier books used elements of horror-fantasy (like Jason Starr and Mick Bertilorenzi’s The Chill), Gabrych and Rader are much more rooted in reality. Their style – from the snappy dialogue and hardboiled narration to the cinematic, chiaroscuro artwork – is deeply rooted in Noir tradition. Take a look at these quotes:

“In a flash, her Jade eyes tear me apart, hungrily look at each piece, and put me back together again.”

“You don’t care about that girl or her mother. No, you’re an over-the-hill drunk who only cares about killing the regret over every bad choice you’ve ever made.”

“I run out of instinct. And it hits me. I ain’t got nowhere to go. No one who’ll have me. I never done nothing right. My whole life. I’m just a pice of shit in this city full of shit. I wanna tear my skin off. Turn into somebody different. I gotta get outta this town.”

“I’m making a noose outta all the loose threads of this job. I’m a shit detective. They could’a got some Pinkerton dick to find Carmen. They didn’t want a dick. They wanted a patsy. I might be a lotta shameful things. But this dick ain’t nobody’s patsy.”

That last quote conjures up memories of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, and the cruel revelations at the end of The Maltese Falcon. Spade doesn’t play the patsy to anyone. Grissel would like to say the same, but unfortunately he can’t, because he did play the patsy. To a lot of people. Namely himself.

Grissel brings to mind an essay written by Dave White called "HEY... Slacker... Get a JOB!!!" for the Do Some Damage blog collective. I’m not sure if he had Fogtown in mind, but it fits in with the overall point of his essay: “It seems the traditional PI is fading and being replaced with another kind of PI. The slacker PI… Guys who really don't want to be PIs but need a way to pay the bills.” He draws a comparison with the traditional model of value-driven PI’s epitomized by Chandler’s Marlowe.

The idea of a disengaged Private Eye isn’t new – look at Jonathan Lattimer’s Karl Craven in Solomon’s Vineyard or even Bill Crane in The Dead Don’t Care – but White’s observation is astute and brings light to Grissel’s character. White says that, “I feel it adds to the suspense. Will the PI do what's right and solve the case? Or will things get so bad he'll just walk away.” As we are reminded throughout Fogtown, Grissel has run away many times before in the past. So, the question remains, will he run away again? Or will he own up to who he is and try to set things straight?

Facing the parts of ourselves we want to forget about. Learning to accept who we are. This, as much as any detective assignment, is the Noir’s protagonist’s challenge.

With literary shades of Woolrich and Spillane, as well as visual echoes of both Film Noir and early comics like The Spirit and Batman, Andersen Gabrych and Brad Rader have create a Noir aficionado’s delight with Fogtown.

"Area 10" by Christos N. Gage and Chris Samnee (Vertigo Crime, 2010)

Christos N. Gage’s Area 10, with art by Chris Samnee, is action-packed, gruesome, and an all-around damned entertaining read. The fifth graphic novel in DC Comic’s Vertigo Crime series, Area 10 fuses the noir archetype of the big city cop haunted by personal demons with the splatter and all-caps adjectives of comic artistry. Frequent sightings of words like “splosh,” “whirrrr,” “crash,” and “whramm” is a guarantee that you won’t be bored reading this, and that the characters in the book will most definitely endure some visually impressive bodily harm.

Adam Kamen is a detective for the NYPD who has never been quite the same since his wife suffered a miscarriage. While stopping a maniac killer, he wound up with a screwdriver through his head. Miraculously, he survived. The side effect, however, is anything but a blessing. Now, whenever Adam looks someone in the face, he sees their future—their impending deaths and, in some cases, their impending crimes. If that wasn’t bad enough, another mad killer is on the loose, leaving a trail of decapitated corpses around the city, and Adam’s co-workers suspect him for the rampage. Adam, meanwhile, suspects that hole in his head might be the key to the whole puzzle.

Area 10’s frenetic mélange of action, carnage, and surrealism reminds me of Duane Swierczynski’s Expiration Date. Think hardboiled noir meets macabre fantasy. Christos N. Gage has the gritty tension of the urban crime thriller down pat, while Chriss Samnee’s art captures the grisly, visual splendor of the story. The detailed depictions of “trepanation”—that is, the ritual of drilling holes through one’s head—are enough to make one squirm, and Adam’s subway battle against a villain who appears only as a blinding light has all the bigger-than-life excitement of superhero comics.

What I most like about the Vertigo Crime line of graphic novels is that they’re accessible to readers who aren’t familiar with graphic publications. They’re written in such a way to draw in crime fiction fans that might not be big comic readers. This was certainly the case with me. I would read comics on and off, but never devotedly. The four Vertigo Crime books that I’ve read—Area 10, The Chill, The Bronx Kill, and The Executor (my favorite)—have turned me on to this format, and I’ve already started looking into other graphic novels in the crime genre. Expect more coverage in the near future.

"The Executor" by Jon Evans and Andrea Mutti (Vertigo Crime, 2010)

DC Comics' Vertigo Crime strikes again with The Executor, and it is their biggest score yet. Written by Jon Evans with art by Andrea Mutti, the story begins with former hockey star Joe Ullen receiving a surprising letter naming him the executor to his high school girlfriend’s estate. Seizing the opportunity to escape his failing relationship with Alice and pen-pushing real estate job, Joe heads back to his old stamping ground in upstate New York in the fictional town of Elora. But instead of tying up loose ends, Joe begins to unravel the mysterious death of Mirriam Litwiller, as well as a decades old tension between the town of Elora and the nearby Native American reservation and several unsolved murders that Joe might know about than he cares to admit.

While the story could use a little more detail about Ullen’s relationship with Alice (she appears only on a few pages at the start of the book and never reappears), once Evans and Mutti land in Elora, the narrative takes off and never looks back until the final graphic panel, when all of the pain and trauma that Joe dug up finally sinks in. It’s a simple story, but all the more compelling and emotionally crushing because of its straightforwardness. Mutti’s cinematic panels match the clarity of Evans’ plotting. When action speaks louder than words, Evans and Mutti smartly choose the former. For atmosphere, nothing beats finding soggy corpses on a rainy night in the woods on the reservation, and for excitement you can’t top the shoot-out in a blazing abandoned factory.

What distinguishes The Executor is its attention to the present-day race and class issues surrounding Native American identity. Evans shows a lot of sensitivity to the subject, which too-often seems to go overlooked. Without resorting to didacticism, he points out how America as a nation still hasn’t come to terms with its complex history. This social context also makes for a gripping plot motivation, on one level showing how latent and unresolved tensions can quickly manifest as violent gestures, and on a larger level showing how society can perpetuate and escalate this violence through ignorance.

If you like your anti-heroes with a troubled conscious and an unredeemable past, don’t miss The Executor. It looks crime on the micro-level—small-town wrongs and personal demons that are worse than anything in the big cities because they are all the more real.

"The Bronx Kill" by Peter Milligan and James Romberger (Vertigo Crime, 2010)

Vertigo Crime’s series of Graphic Mysteries continues with The Bronx Kill, a collaboration between acclaimed British comic book writer Peter Milligan and artist James Romberger. Playing off the double meaning of the word “kill,” the duo have found one of those perfect titles for a crime story—and they don’t waste it. They nail the New York atmosphere and populate the city with generations of closeted skeletons that refuse to stay locked away. Like the Bronx waterfront the title refers to, the characters in the story are damp with rot and decay, and whether or not they’re found floating in the river, they are, each in their own way, drowning.

Cops run in Martin’s family, a tradition he thinks he ends by becoming a writer. The past, however, doesn’t let go quite so easily, and Martin finds himself haunted by the mysterious death of his Great-Grandfather at the “Bronx Kill” across from Randall’s Island, as well as the disappearance of his own grandmother that left his father without a mother growing up. As Martin begins to explore these issues in his new book, his wife suddenly goes missing, and he finds himself the police’s number one suspect. As Martin searches for the strange man he saw outside his apartment window one night, he also begins to piece together the missing parts of his family’s history.

One of the things that interests me in crime-themed graphic storytelling is the way that language—so central to the identity of the crime genre—undergoes a transformation. The cross-currents of comics and crime fiction go way back: Spillane worked in comics (and the influence on the Mike Hammer novels is certainly clear in its hyper-stylization), as did Robert Leslie Bellem (whose Dan Turner stories was also a comic series for a while). While the syncopated, concise dialogue that characterizes hard-boiled fiction is perfectly suited to the comic format, the stylized narration (whether first- or third-person) is not necessarily. Instead, it is replaced by images that must convey the internalized vision of the characters, the lilt of their voices, and the thousand-and-one nuances that can be communicated by even the shortest paragraph. The noir paradigm must become almost completely visual—and thankfully, the evocative nature of the noir style lends itself naturally to pictorial storytelling.

Except for the occasional “AHGHH!” or other non-verbal outbursts, Milligan’s prose is decidedly understated. Dialogue moves swiftly, never getting caught up in either exposition or excessive description. This is where the partnership with Romberger pays off. The lack of color gives his drawings a monochromatic elegance, like the foggy set of an old Hollywood B-picture. Considering the story’s preoccupation with death, disappearance, and the past, the colorless characters fittingly evoke phantoms and the specter of death, which is always hiding just behind the next page.

The most interesting aspect of The Bronx Kill is not just the story itself, but the way it is told. It is a meta-narrative that gives us glimpses of Martin’s text as he is writing it. (The story-within-a-story is similarly a story drenched in murder, history, and family trauma.) We are even privy to Martin’s edits—words crossed out, others added, and assorted other jottings ranging from his own insecurities and questions about the text to connections to his own family’s past. In marked opposition to Milligan’s restrained prose, Martin’s paragraphs are full of long-winded sentences and overwrought passages. However, as Martin explains to his editor at one point, “It’s a first draft. Written under extraordinary circumstances.” By revealing the process of writing, Milligan shows the way (or one way, at least) in which narrative is constructed— or, rather, the way in which a narrator (like Martin) tries to make sense of out details that confound, confuse, and obsess us.

This is the second book in the Vertigo Crime series that I’ve read (the other was Jason Starr and Mick Bertilorenzi’s The Chill), and I continue to be impressed with their work. I’m looking forward to reading their upcoming books The Executor by Jon Evans and Andrea Mutti and Area 10 by Christos N. Gage and Chris Samnee.

And now for a couple of pieces of wisdom from The Bronx Kill…

“There is surely no good place to be killed. But this kill was not such a bad place to have your life snatched away, if snatched away it had to be.”

“It’s like all the pain just gets handed on and on, ain’t it?”

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Cover art by Lee Bermejo

"The Chill" by Jason Starr and Mick Bertilorenzi (Vertigo Crime, 2010)

2010 is off to a great start for Jason Starr, who just came off a very successful 2009 with the one-two punch of Fake I.D. in May and Panic Attack in August (review coming soon), as well as news that Bret Easton Ellis was adapting The Follower into a series for HBO and Lionsgate TV. Part of DC Comics’ Vertigo Crime line of graphic novels, The Chill pairs Starr with artist Mick Bertilorenzi, a union of perfectly matched styles. Starr’s sensibility—edgy, hardboiled, darkly funny—finds visual expression through Bertilorenzi’s artwork, as equally adept at capturing action-packed violence as it is subtler, pensive moments that bring characters’ inner tensions to the surface with their furrowed brows and clenched teeth. The latent horror always present in Starr’s work is much more pronounced in The Chill, and it naturally complements his usual interests in psychology, sexual mores, social satire, and the rich and varied landscape of New York City.

Before we get to the city, however, Starr takes us first to County Clare, Ireland. It’s the summer of 1967, and two young lovers—Martin and Arlana—are out for a stroll in the countryside. As they lay down and begin to embrace each other, something unexpected happens—an intense chill overtakes Martin, who is completely frozen. It’s a hell of a way for Arlana to realize that her family heritage isn’t quite so normal.

Cut to present day New York City. The dismembered, frozen bodies of young men are turning up all across the city. The police are baffled not only by the bizarre, brutal crimes, but also the lack of evidence: plenty of people saw the victims going off with a strange woman prior to their deaths, but no two witnesses can agree on what they saw. But then a mysterious rogue cop from Boston shows up who knows a thing or two about Irish mythology and “The Chill,” and it’s up to him to put a stop to an age-old, flesh-hungry curse.

Back-alley passions, decapitation, unholy demons, sleazy bars, and a citywide dragnet, plus more spears, sex and psychopaths than should be collected between two covers (but thankfully are). Bertilorenzi’s images drip with blood (even the shadows seem gory they are so dense), and Starr’s dialogue is as sharp and funny as ever. That, in a nutshell, is The Chill. And what a wonderfully demented nutshell it is. Fans of Starr’s work won’t want to miss this one.