One Coin Reads 24: Assassinistas, by Trini Howard and Gilbert Hernandez

Assassinistas, by Trini Howard and Gilbert Hernandez

2018

It's often easier to talk about a book you loved or hated, than it is to talk about one that didn't much move you either way.

I've tried to get into Gilbert Hernandez multiple times over the years, and it's been hard. I don't enjoy something in the way he draws. He's been doing lots of non-Love and Rockets work for years, and there wasn't much reason for me to check that stuff out if I wasn't into the art already. 

This year, I read his first L&R omnibus, and once I got into it, I enjoyed it a lot, but more for the writing and the density of the world building more than anything else. But I did like it, and I picked up the second omnibus after.

Then

That was some of my thinking before picking up this book, though this was marked down to very near my ¥500 sampling sweet spot, ¥487. It wasn't bad at all, but for a lot of the book, I kept thinking, Is this it?

I'm not well-versed in the work of Tini Howard at all. I know she's done or is doing some X-Calibur work, and I read two or three issues, but it didn't leave an impression either way. That's not a criticism of her work in particular, I tried reading most of the Dawn of X series when they came out and quickly dropped them all. I figured I would go back a year later and see what was worth reading after they were all collected rather than sort through the roughly infinity books they insist on publishing. I'll check her out in X of Swords when the collection is inevitably published.

Now

Assassinistas has a nice enough concept: three women lived a Charlies Angels like life back "then", and "now" it's twenty years later. Time is only referenced in terms of then and now. All the women kick butt, all the guys are nice family-oriented types, emphasizing the role-reversal already present in a concept like Charlies Angels. 

The Assassinistas are Octavia, Charlotte, and Rosalyn. Octavia has a son in college and is struggling to meet the bills, and has gone back to work, to the frustration of her son, Dominic. Domenic just wants a normal family life.

Now

Charlotte's baby is kidnapped, and the story is about Octavia, Domenic and his boyfriend doing a rescue mission.

There was definitely stuff I liked in this. The character work is pretty solid. Domenic makes a point about coming out to his mother Octavia, and the tension is complex in good way: he has tried to come out before, but his mother is too obsessed with her work to notice. He worries about her reaction to him being gay, but she's mainly upset he didn't share it with her sooner. These are strong traits to build characters from: two people who have are frustrated with each other, but for very different reasons than the other thinks.

 

The relationships of the Assassanistas themselves have their own dynamics, as they all have taken different paths in life, some more traditional than others.

Then

There are some sequences which work nicely as well, but for an action book, there was a lack of excitement. I can't lay the blame on the writing or the art, since I don't know where Howard's idea ends and Hernandez's contributions begin. In the best scenes, images build off of one another, but a lot of the action has little energy.

Whenever I'm not feeling Beto's art, he pulls out a pair of panels like this, which are flawless in design and execution: The extreme perspective in panel one, the boy half off-panel in two, and the shared floor line in both

Putting gore and sex and swearing in a book like this, but not exciting gore and sex and swearing is weird to me. The book isn't making any commentary on action tropes, it seems to be going for fun. This book feels more like an Archie version of Kill Bill, but it didn't work as humor, and it didn't work as action.

The colors by Rob Davis are nice and simple, subtly different between the past and present sections

I feel like the pieces are there for something better, but this book, collecting six issues, didn't do it for me. The overall feeling I had from this was of a very straight-forward action comic. Sure, it has women in the lead, non-traditional gender dynamics, and a legendary alternative cartoonist on art, but the actual story of the book, a kidnapping rescue, was very very traditional action, with art that didn't always serve the action well. It's not bad, but it's hard to say it's any better than any other mainstream comic out there.

I'm still just getting into Hernandez's work, and will probably stick with his Love & Rockets work for the time being. I imagine this was a fun project for him to work on, but it didn't carry over to my reading experience.

I Really Should Read This 6: Parker, The Outfit, by Darwyn Cooke

Parker, The Outfit, by Darwyn Cooke

2010

I've read and enjoyed some of Cooke's work, but I haven't put much effort into getting a hold of it. The number one reason is DC is generally uninteresting to me, and that's where a lot of his work has appeared. Last summer, I decided to try out his Parker series, and after reading the first one, I promptly ordered the second (and third and fourth after that, just because I realized I wanted to have them).

The first Parker book took me off guard. I knew nothing about it other than it was based on a series of novels. The main character is not a good guy. He kills people. He's not a killer, he's just a thief, but when he needs to, he kills people. Once I adjusted to the notion that it was an anti-hero story, I was totally with it.

This is why I'm only buying the hardcover versions.

The story in this, and in the first book, are good. They are classic hard-boiled tough guy tales with manly men, sniveling men, stunning women, bad choices, and lots of money. As a genre, it's not my cup of tea, but when it's done at the top of its game, like in the Soderbergh Oceans 11 film or in Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips' Criminal series, it's great. 

And it's great here. Cooke was known as a storyteller, and he's completely stripped down to the essentials here. None of this computer-gradient skylines or sterile lettering. This is him and his brushes and Rapidographs (I'm guessing), and two tones of ink. It's completely refined, but it feels a little punk at the same time.

The wordless sequences sing. You follow the action intuitively. The pages with lots of dialogue can't be equally intuitive, but he shifts angles and lets the characters "act" enough to never let it become talking heads. This was Cooke at the height of his powers.

I don't even know the style he's referencing here, like a 1950's Esquire?

There's a weird break in the book about halfway through, where he does a massive stylistic change. I was going with it when it happened, but I wasn't really sure why it was there. When I got to the parts after that, and understood why he was doing that, it was great and 100% I understood what he had done. That's a good experience with a comic. Not merely to be surprised by it, but to get to the end and say, "Ah yeah!" with it. 

"I wasn't asking."

I'm not all that interested to become a Cooke completist. I'm sure his Batman issues are solid, but I just don't care that much. I have the New Frontier, that covers me for DC action books. And I'm not crazy about buying the stuff that's been expensively repackaged after his death.

These Parker books though, I need to get them. The storytelling, the aesthetic... I'd love to add a third aspect, but it's mainly those two things. Cooke was so good at what he did, that that is enough.