The library is a great place for readers to discover comics, and it’s a great place for comics readers to check out things that they want to try without spending their hard-earned cash. I’m looking at comics that I find in the New York Public Library system.
Lots of people have been recommending the new DC/Vertigo serial Scalped to me, so I figured I’d check out the first trade paperback collection, Indian Country. Perhaps the hype had me expecting too much, because I see potential in the series, but it’s not quite there. At least not yet. Jason Aaron writes this critically popular series, and R.M. Guera is the illustrator.
Here’s the gist: Dashiell Bad Horse returns to the Prairie Rose Indian Reservation in South Dakota, from which he left/was exiled from at the age of thirteen (which we are told repeatedly, just as we’re reminded he’s been away for fifteen years). He gets a gig as hired muscle for the local crime boss and casino owner Red Crow. His mom’s furious at him, yet secretly loves him still. To complete the core family dynamic, Red Crow’s daughter is the local whore/alcoholic who Bad Horse had a youthful crush on. Oh, and Bad Horse’s secretly an FBI agent, blackmailed into returning to the reservation by a jerky superior.
Guera’s art is wonderful, gritty and stylized, wallowing in its poverty and desperation. The characters have lived their lives, and it shows on every line of their faces. The storytelling’s pretty solid to boot. So the art’s working pretty well, supporting the decadence of the script and conveying information clearly. So far so good.
Unfortunately, the story’s just not clicking for me. Bad Horse is just too much – too much posturing, too much cocksure smartassness, too damn superheroic for a down-on-his-luck loser. At one point, he get ambushed by a half dozen gunmen – he walks through an open door into a barn, everybody is training a gun on that doorway and is sheltered from his direct line of sight – and he still manages to kill or maim every one of them. It’s so over the top, completely ludicrous and out of place with the hype I’d heard about how gritty and realized the series is. Again, perhaps it’s my expectation just being too jarringly off from what Aaron’s delivering here.
Then again, the character arcs aren’t doing much to overcome the over-cooked hard-boiled absurdity of it all. The characters’ language is like Raymond Chandler dialogue on anabolic steroids. You can guess six pages into the story that Bad Horse’s mom has a secret history with his nemesis Red Crow, just as you can count pages until Bad Horse and Red Crow’s daughter get down in violent fashion. It could be cool and shocking, but it’s all just laying there on the page, predictable, obvious.
But, like I said, a lot of people have recommended this series to me.
I’m going to give it more rope, and that’s one of the great things about the library. You can give a series another chance to develop to its potential when it’s not going to cost you anything but time.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:51 am
I liked Scalped after the first trade, but the second one blew me away, and it just keeps getting better. It’s my favorite book currently out–I promise you’ll love it if you keep going with it.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:07 am
I must respectfully disagree. Scalped is the best monthly comic out there, in my opinion.
I find the characters to be the most interesting that I am currently reading about. Yes, it’s hard-boiled and overheated (I happen to be a fan of that type of thing – plus I would liken the language much more to Dashiel Hammett than Raymond Chandler. Chandler was always more romantic than Hammett, and Scalped is anything but romantic), but I do not think it’s predictable, except in the inevitability from forces taking on a life of their own.
And regarding your criticism of Bad Horse taking out all those guys single-handedly, he is quite a bad ass, plus if you keep reading you find that he has a large amount of self-loathing and insecurity that leads him to acts of self-destruction like that. You often have a hard time taking on a guy who doesn’t care what happens to him.
January 3rd, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Chiming in that you need to give it a chance. When you describe its basics, there is a lot about the story that may not seem exceptional. In my opinion, it’s how Scalped is told that really makes it.
That second volume that Sarah notes is amazing. Taking those characters and situations just introduced, it takes place on one night and the examines connections among them. The way it’s done would be difficult to pull off in any other medium with the same impact, and I hold it up as one of the best examples of what comics can achieve.
I’m also a sucker for the way Aaron’s taking history and giving it a bit of a fictionalized twist, creating scenarios that are familiar — yet a bit unexpected. And how he and Guera are creating such evocative, (and to the the best of my knowledge, frighteningly accurate) settings.
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Thanks for the thoughts, guys. I definitely plan to give it a second chance. Though last time I checked the library’s website, they didn’t have vol. 2 in stock. They do have vol. 3 on order (but not yet available), so I may be forced to skip a chapter, but I’ll definitely be giving it another shot at impressing me.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Umm … hold out for vol. 2. I didn’t think 3 was quite as strong, plus you’ll miss out on some revelations and other developments.
So they have 1 and are getting 3, but not 2? Might be a good opportunity to introduce yourself to the people in charge of ordering books ….