Reading Through 2021 90: The Last Days of American Crime, by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini

The Last Days of American Crime, by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini

2009, Image collection 2017

Sometimes you get it in your head that you like a writer, and it takes a number of books to realize you don't like them that much.

It's a good cover

I first read Remender's work with his X-Force run way back when, and I liked it a lot. Since then, he's been a writer I liked, but I don't think I've loved his work since then. I've written about Fear Agent here, which was fun, but not incredible, but I've had similar experiences with Tokyo Ghost, Deadly Class, and I don't remember what else. Up to now, Low has been my favorite work by him, which shares the same artist as this, Greg Tocchini.

The skin tones are bold enough to support the sketchy linework

I like Sean Murphy and Wes Craig's art a lot. Sean Murphy single-handedly made Tokyo Ghost a marvel to read. But Greg Tocchini does something which really hits me in a way most genre artists don't: I love his lighting. The layouts are fine, the character designs are fine, but he's so adept at taking the lighting of a room and getting the flesh colors just right, the shadows just right, and building up an atmosphere. I have to wonder what Low would be if he weren't illustrating it.

Tocchini is quite good at doing a sensual brush stroke

Here, he's applying his skills to crime rather than sci-fi. Going in, I thought it might be a noir, and in construction it is, but so much of the book is drenched in light that it loses that vibe. The book has a distinctly California feel from the motels, the blue skies, the sunsets, and the multicultural racism.

The vision of police swarming American cities is less and less far-fetched everyday

The book collects three oversized issues to make up a single story. A ex-con hooks up with a pathological couple to complete a heist on the final day of American crime. The overarching shadow over the story is that crime is rampant, and the government will begin broadcasting a signal that will psychologically prevent people from breaking the law. The heist will happen on the eve of the broadcast. 

These are Bad Dudes

As a story, there isn't that much there. The ex-con meets the couple, they get ready, then they do the heist, with an ultra-violent interlude in the second issue. I don't mind that overall; plots tend to disappoint the more they are relied on. The first issue of this was the most enjoyable for me. The ex-con, Graham, is established as someone barely keeping his nose clean, and with scores he wants to settle. The femme fatale of the story, Shelby, is less mysterious than in your typical noir: right up front you see that she is playing all sides and is a main character rather than someone who pops in and out to tempt the lead. She has all but given up on humanity, and Graham's bottomline decency affects her.  Sure, Graham will sleep with her in an instant, but he also won't let her get beat up and raped. That's decency in this world.

Again, Tocchini's killing it with the lighting

That might not sound like much, but they are clearly characterized, and not stock stereotypes. The third in the heist, Kevin, is much more of a stock character, and one that Remender seems compelled to put into all his work: the psychopath. He had a rich, scumbag daddy, and now Kevin is a rich, scumbag young man. That's the first major strike I have against Remender's writing, that he wants to write like it's mature, but he also wants a black-and-white plainly evil character in his books. It's a very Quentin-Tarantino school of plot design. And I'm not against the psychopath archetype, just not in every book, as it seems to be with Remender's creator-owned work (I don't recall a psychopath in X-Force, but it's been a while).

This is a Robocop 2-level of urban decay

The second issue is the weak point for me. It feels like filler. It tries to be splashy, but it was trying too hard for my tastes. Graham goes up against a Latino gang, with lots of racism, rape, and car chases. I'll compare it here to Brubaker and Philips' Criminal or Lapham's Stray Bullets, where they would have the same thing, but it's upsetting and stressful. Here, it's much more of a "Fuck yeah!" version of racism, rape, and car chases. I enjoy crime books where the guns and exploding heads are horrifying much more than where it's awesome. I can enjoy exploding heads in a book which is going for over the top, but that's not the tone of the first issue. I guess the problem for me was that the tone was inconsistent. It shifted between a moody, atmospheric crime story and a bombastic violent farce.

Everybody hates everybody

In the end, they do the heist, many more people die, and the book ends. The sci-fi idea of the mind-altering broadcast is barely touched on, though it comes in at the end to tie up the story. It's a shame, because other than a talking head on TV at the start, the book never really considers what that would do to a society. There would be no crime, but people would lose the choice to be good, like with the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange. Only here, people would be reliant on the law to decide what is acceptable. Lawmakers could abuse this by rewriting the laws and the populace would be helpless. Normalcy and patriotism could effectively be made law. There were a lot of ideas just left on the table here.

This was the point I dropped out. It wasn't exciting, it killed the mood that had been building

Overall, I liked this for the art. The story was fine, but not exceptional. The art carried it. That seems to be a common thread for creator-owned work these days. Produce a competent story with a few conceptual hooks behind it, and get one of the many super-talented working artists to illustrate it and share copyright for it. Nothing exceptional.  

Remender and Tocchini got this made into a Netflix movie last year and got paid, and that alone would make it worth their time to produce this.

One Coin Reads 28: Fear Agent volume 3, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Matthew Hawthorne

Fear Agent volume 3, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Matthew Hawthorne

2009-2011

Purchased at the same time I got the second collection, I finally finished off the book Fear Agent.

Grizzled

With this, I've read half of the run. I haven't bought the first, and there is a fourth odds-and-ends book, but Book 3 officially ends the story. With Book 2, I was a little confused as to what the whole concept was, as the first of the two arcs there occurred before the events of the first book. Here, I mostly understand the world and have a history with the characters, but it's wrapping up storylines I missed the first chapter of. As a result, perhaps some of the things don't hit quite as deeply. But for the most part, any praise or criticism I have for this isn't too connected to the bigger story.

Space cowboys

As a quick refresher, Fear Agent is pulp sci-fi, with the name and title font being a big hint of that. It's closer to 50's sci-fi in tone than to the "hard sci-fi" which is normal today. Humanity has largely been wiped out, and star Heathrow Huston is an alcoholic Texan floating from one crappy situation to the next, surviving by the skin of his teeth.

The best thing about this is that it has fun. It's full of dark, bleak situations, but tries to make the story pulpy and crazy. The flip side of that though is that when the book wants to have heavy emotion, it struggles because it's all so goofy.

There's a lot of flashback exposition in this run

The last collection had an arc by Tony Moore, and another by Jerome Opeña, and with that, I definitely preferred Opeña's. Here, Opeña was probably busy drawing X-Force or something, and the art is done by Moore and Matthew Hawthorne. Both are very competent artists, but they both lack the ability to give the book drama. The back cover has a blurb of praise from Jack Davis, of E.C. Comics and Mad fame, and he was a guy who could have pulled it off. A book like this requires some old school skills to ground the ridiculous.

It's a solid sequence, but the grizzle isn't grizzled enough for me

Moore and Hawthorne are doing fine work on this, but I don't think they are a perfect match for the material.

The collection contains two arcs, and the second works better than the first. In the first, I Against I, Huston crash lands on an alien planet with a Wild West style city filled with humans, some that he knows. The reason for this is very convoluted and probably what held it back for me. There is a time-displaced version of Huston there, a doppelgänger, and trying to make it make sense was too much for me. Remender had a vision of Huston fighting Huston, and a plot resolution of the story that was really inventive, so I understand why he wanted to get there, but the book creaks while trying to make this goofy sci-fi make sense. I would just as well have seen him do some hand-waving and go straight to the fireworks factory.

The fireworks factory

The second arc, Out of Step, worked better for me, with a winding yet coherent path to the end of the series. An aged, lonely Huston wanders the galaxy nursing an unhealthy degree of alcoholism. The book has had some time travel shenanigans in the previous arcs, and the final solution for the depressed Huston is to fix time itself.

This isn't a very honest portrayal of alcoholism as Huston is super high functioning. At this point, he should at least have puffy skin

The story is about someone on their last legs, having mostly given up, and it's decent. As an end to the series, the climax tries to make it both galaxy-altering and personal to Huston. This series has had so many shock endings and deaths of main characters, that there is actually a lot of doubt as to how it might resolve. A happy ending isn't a given in the world that's been set up here. 

At the end of it all, it was a satisfactory resolution. Not mind-blowing, but plot resolutions rarely are.

Overall, I liked this series. I didn't love it, but the idea behind it, to make a modern, expanded version of the old pulp stories, was nice to read.

Remender is one of the contemporary comic writers who I've been trying to get a better understanding of. I never quite love what he's doing, but I really find it compelling. With this series, I like the exploration of grief and alcoholism in a book with exploding space monsters. 

There's a lot more flashback exposition in the second arc too

I have a couple more series of his that I'm looking forward to digging into. I've read the first arc of Low and Black Science, and especially with Low, I felt like the art was capable of carrying the drama of the book. 

A book like Fear Agent though seems more fun than anything else. The pathos and the emotion end up being dressing for the blood and aliens.

Blast off!

That's okay though. I definitely got my worth out of these collections. They were enjoyable and worth revisiting someday.

One Coin Reads 15: Fear Agent, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Jerome Opena

Fear Agent, by Rick Remender, Tony Moore, and Jerome Opena

2000's, collected in 2018

For weeks, as I was scouring the discount books, Fear Agent was looking back at me. ¥387. That's practically free. I read a bunch of Rick Remender work in the last few years: X-Force, Tokyo Ghost, Low, Deadly Class, Black Science. I like it, but it makes me a little tired with it's in-your-face rock and roll attitude. And I'm not a fan of Tony Moore's art (not a hater, but not a fan). Still, the cover looked fun. It has a Mars Attacks! vibe.

Anyway, long story short, I bought it and accidentally ordered the third book as well, so I'm on the way to knowing Fear Agent.

You know exactly what that beam sounds like just by looking at it

Fear Agent is a story about Earth as it gets involved in an intergalactic conflict. It was confusing at first, as book two opens with a four issue story of aliens landing, blowing things up, and the humans fighting back. I wondered if it was a pulp anthology series that restarted each arc, but in the second storyline, characters from the first arc appeared, years having passed and them looking grizzled. I was actively avoiding Wikipedia while reading since you shouldn't have to check a book's backstory when you read it, but I was genuinely puzzled as to what the concept behind the book was.  I had to do some leaps in logic to connect the dots between the first and second arcs, but it was nothing too challenging. After finishing the book, a Wikipedia check revealed that that first arc was a flashback, and the second story started where the first book collection left off.

I don't know if that's a case of, "That's what you get for starting with book two," but it wasn't exactly user friendly. 

There is excessive violence, verging on comedic

The book has a tone that's hard to pin down at first. The stories are very pulpy, and I'm all in for that, but the art, especially Tony Moore, is cartoony and takes away from the grittiness of it. If Remender could have time travelled and gotten Wally Wood to draw this, it would have been legendary. As it is, Moore's art doesn't suck me in. I had the exact same vibe with his art the first arc of Walking Dead: he's really a talented artist, but he's not a good fit for dramatic stories.

Moore is happy to draw gore, but it doesn't shock me

Opeña manages better, and I was amazed at just how different this art work was from his X-Force work. Here he does fairly traditional ink work, and it ranges from cartoony to classic EC. Some of it really captured a classic sci-fi style. He definitely becomes a better artist in the years to come, but his work here is strong.

I liked the pulp vibe the book was going for. The aliens are ridiculous looking. The physics don't have to make sense. This is not hard sci-fi. It's called science-fiction, not science-boring. 

Kipferia brings John Carter of Mars to mind

This came out before Remender and Opeña did X-Force together, so it was an opportunity to see them before they had developed into the heavyweight creators they are today. I mostly enjoy Remender's 2010's work. He's got a good pace to his stuff, and creates fleshed out worlds. And he has some fun with his work. It's not serious stuff to over-analyze, but old fashioned melodrama polished up for a modern audience. More than his current books like Deadly Class or Low though, Fear Agent is a fun book.

I liked that panel on the right: classic pose, classic ray gun

When I'm reading with a book review in mind, I often stop to take a few pics to remind myself what stood out as I was reading, and with this book, while there was tons of crazy stuff, I didn't take any pics. None of it is exceptional. But I enjoyed the book overall and will keep it. I'll probably pull this trade and give it a reread in a few years. It's fun and breezy, and sometimes that hits the spot.