The Masculine Adventures of the SuperFisters
So you're feeling macho, is that it? Well sir, you can either take out your aggressions with one of those squeezy stress balls, or you can immerse yourself in the snarling tough-guy posturing of this week's comics, all brought to our manly attention by the delightful chaps at Isotope Comics. First up: Adam Pollina's gritty and manic "Romp," a comic book series (and soon to be movie) about a titular armless up-and-coming thug just trying to scrape by on the tough streets of the inner city. That means lots of graffiti-inspired artwork, and narrow-eyed glowering, and voiceovers written in one of those scratchy fonts that looks like someone etched it by hand except that all the letters are identical so it's obvious that it's really just typed out on a computer.
Romp's got a good heart -- he wants to fight bullies and protect the little guy, his limblessness notwithstanding -- and being all urban and everything, he doesn't do much thinking about it. He just sort of lunges about, altenating between getting smacked and head-butting his enemies, narrating it in a sort of animalistic ego-monologue: "Nose itches. Can't f**king scratch. Go I hate that. I'll always hate that. It ain't a handicap though. It's my design. It makes me better." And so forth. In issue 1, Romp engages a brutish lady-bully and they hurt each other for a while until somebody wins, and in the end there's little more to say than, "a job well done," yet somehow the narrator manages to squeeze out a seemingly endless monologue about, oh who knows, his life or combat or the nature of violence or something.
After the jump: war, and crime, and stuff, probably.
Good luck following the story of Mark Ricketts' gritty and brooding Dioramas: A Love Story; it's a little confusing. You know how, in film-noirs, everyone talks in cutesy idioms, and every word has a second, hidden meaning? While reading Dioramas we kept getting the feeling like the hidden meaning was the ONLY meaning. Everyone seems to be talking about something we haven't heard about yet, and it's like we either missed an issue (not possible, since it's contained in a single novel) or everyone's so consumed with sounding cool they're only semi-coherent.
But anyway. The story concerns a no-nonsense lady just trying to scrape by on the tough streets of the inner city. According to the dustjacket, she's being stalked by a psychotic serial killer; but if that's the case, it went over our heads. In fact, every relationship in the book went over our heads; there's two cops, and some small-time crime chicks, and a psychiatrist, and somehow we never managed to figure out how they were all connected. Is the story jumping around in time? Who are they chasing now? Why'd he make the Mormons take their shoes off? What's she doing in a cage? The whole story's a bit like an Escher drawing, where everything gives the impression of being connected but you don't know where to look first to figure out how.
Our favorite book this week was Brian Azzarello and Joe Kubert's gritty and desperate Sgt Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place, a microcosm of the horrors of war set deep in a German forest during World War II. A band of soldiers, just trying to scrape by in the tough trenches of a war zone, struggles to capture prisoners, maintain their grip on reality, and keep from getting blown up, all while lost and terrified in terrain so unfamiliar and threatening it's like another planet. If you wanted to make a movie out of this book, first you'd need to find a way to bring John Wayne back to life; it's THAT kind of a story. Guns, explosions, squinty-eyed mutterings, gory deaths, regrets, indominable spirit -- pretty much everything you'd hope to find in a good solid war story.