Broken Frontier

The summer of 1933 was brutal, or least that’s the idea behind this book exploring the Gangster Mythology of America.  Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and Machine Gun Kelly… these names conjure gunfire, police stand offs, robberies, and booze running.  This book puts them in a unified fight against the largest racketeer in U.S. history, Al Capone.

Westerman gives us a tightly wound Noir.  The hip narration and the flashbacks mingle with the darkly shadowed and minimalistic art.  The narrative flows well without too much ham-fisted monologuing, but the script is marred by anachronisms.  “Synergy” and “Scorched Battlefield Policy” are just a little out of place.

All is forgiven by the incredible premise.  Floyd narrates how each of these iconic gangsters comes to want to enact a blood debt on Scarface.  Through happenstance their vengeance is united, but the journey there is like a text book on how to stay at the top of a crime syndicate.  There is lavish detail in how to push and squeeze you way to the top; of course, you’ll make lots of enemies on the way up.  I learned more about the way this sect of society operates from this comic book then I did from the Coppola and Scorsese films that defined my concept of the gangster.

As much as the Greatest Generation and the Old West, the Mafia make up some of the most powerful images in our national Mythos.  Westerman not acknowledges this tradition through these legendary outlaws; he also ties it into the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Kennedy patriarch, and Baseball.  It is a skillful mining of the American subconscious lending to an epic scope for the piece.

Chamberlain enhances the tension through his exhaustive use of shadowing.  Faces are hidden until they will be impactful.  Panels are minimalistic until the detail will provide for the most visceral imagery.  While the art is not refined as Russell Metty’s cinematography in Touch of Evil, Chamberlain’s understanding of the Noir visual technique is the best I have seen a comic – especially given the pure black and white of the book.  It would have been much easier to immolate the feel with grayscale.

I’ve never been overly excited by the concept of a gangster comic.  While Scalped and 100 Bullets are good, the just aren’t Goodfellas, The Usual Suspects, or even The Untouchables. Pretty Baby Machine is the kind of book that can alter one’s perception of a whole genre… it makes me think it is time to check out a couple of graphic novels by some guy named Max Alan Collins.