Broken Frontier

Lou and Wendell are bounty hunters.  They aren’t your normal run of the mill Papa Thorson types though.  Lou is a werewolf, so disenchanted with the human race that he stays in his feral form.  Wendell is foul mouthed and has a bad temper; he’s also a former pastor.  Together they are an odd couple, working for an even odder bails bond company.

Joe Kelly is on a roll.  With the inspired genius of Four Eyes, the lonely depth of I Kill Giants, and the criminal lunacy of Bang! Tango, the writer is showing himself as a man of incomparable imagination.  What makes this book catch people from the solicitation is a pretty cool cover and a killer concept.  What makes it a bit of fresh air in the incredibly deep market of comics is the care that the scribe takes to tell an interesting story as well.

When you have a werewolf as a bounty hunter, it is easy to make the horror be the draw.  When you have a preacher with “God’s Johnson” tattooed across his chess dropping more f-bombs than Garth Ennis being stung by a million bees, it is easy to dwell in the muck of base humor.  Kelly instead finds an interesting way to tell a story.

This is accomplished through Lou.  The big bad wolf is the heart of this book.  Wendell, Daisy, the waitress with a crush on the furry guy, Mrs. Chico, the dirty minded woman who runs the bail bonds service that employs the cowboy hat wearing bounty hunter and his partner, and all the other bits of insightful commentaries on the state of our species called characters are set dressing. 

It is easy to see that Lou doesn’t like people in general.  The most obvious clue is that he refuses to change into his human form.  There are more subtle hints along the way though.  He just has an attitude that he has given up.  However, he is smarter than that and seems to be searching for more.  There are moments - whether they be with a disembodied head kept in his refrigerator or with a one armed veteran in a bar - where you see that he simply wants more.  It isn’t that he hates people; he hates how the majority of the human race chooses to present themselves.  There are good folk out there; it is just hard to pick them out from the white noise of a society at its end.  A society where mothers can burn their children or where third world countries can develop weapons of mass destruction is at the heart of his moral dilemma.

There is the sense, through foreshadowing revolving around milk cartons, that Lou is about to have a Jerry Maguire epiphany - the kind of thing that will cause Wendell to ridicule him. When the conclusion of a run turns for the worse, it is made even more obvious that the werewolf is at a philosophical crossroads.  That is the kind of writing that is inventive and intense while paying careful attention to provide astonishing character work. 

Kelly is slowly schooling the entire comics creator community on how to write fun, meaningful, and modern tales.  Morrison and Bendis would do well to take note; this guy is the real deal.  He has all the earmarks of being remembered fondly twenty to thirty years from now.  Sometimes, it seems that not many writers today will be.  Topicality and edge are important, but sometimes these more prolific writers think shock is more important than fun.  Kelly walks the line between the two with surgical skill.

The art by Greco walks the same creative line.  Somewhere between the highly rendered art seemingly preferred by the mainstream audience and the glee of pure cartooning, the artist provides nifty action sequences and detailed scenery.  A bar inhabited by all that Lou finds attractive and repulsive about the human race bustles with activity and the kind of background extras for which readers would like to hear the story is as expertly illustrated as the lonely trailer that the two leads call their home.  All the while, it is not hard to imagine that this werewolf interacts with the people around him.

Bad Dog is pure comic bliss.  It is the kind of thing that would have set Dr. Fredric Wertham into a rage, but for the rest of us, it is the perfect vehicle to make us examine everything around us all while thoroughly entertaining us.  What more could one possibly want from a comic book?