Broken Frontier

Crime novelist Gregg Hurwitz  (The Crime Writer, Last Shot) takes his first shot at comics, with a standard story about just another loser.  But it’s a good one.

Commercial fiction writers—mired within a medium where formula is held in even higher regard than it is in comics—seem to have a difficult time entering into the idea-laden zeitgeist that the more fantastical fields of genre fiction have ever been saddled with, since the Gothic era came and ripped-off all things mythical straight from out of myth.  The thrill of having any best-selling novelist pen a comic script, then, stems from the somewhat intuitive theory that they currently represent the missing half of a whole—modern masters of capricious genre-creativity such as Morrison, Niles, and Ellis, all manage books that overflow with weird and astonishing inventions, yet sacrifice heavily on dimensions of character, honest psychology, and, often, even a book’s plot and pacing (if such hinders their inventive wildness).  So in counterpoint, when a novelist comes aboard, they tend to select only a single or select few faces and then belabor these personalities’ finer points, their trials and fears, their insecurities, their pasts, their everything (should they have the page count to do so).

Hurwitz definitely falls into this textbook born-and-raised-on-the-novelese camp, opting for the emblematic “character driven” comic tale, with its title protagonist acting as mere plot device for another, more ordinary narrator to weave a yarn of commonplace misery and woe.  J. Patrick Smitty is the name Hurwitz grants his regular-Joe archetype, a man with a troublous childhood, followed through with poor decision after poor decision (and indeed, Hurwitz directly confesses in the script: “You know this story…”).  Smitty ultimately makes one wrong move too many, and hurts the wrong civilian at the absolutely wrong time, and only too late realizes that a certain Canadian unkillable killing machine is now hot on his trail, and that he therefore has only a limited amount of time in which to live.

The story is staunchly generic, yet it’s effective.  Smitty isn’t, sadly, a character whose motivations and psychological minutiae are understood much beyond the cursory, and the details of his downward spiral toward a vigilante-passed death sentence hold nary a surprise nor intriguing twist.  Even after the countdown to his final breath commences, there’s nothing unique, nothing clever, nothing unexpected—all that’s left, and indeed all that’s in any way a part of the story from the beginning is the blow-by-blow accounting of Smitty’s last days.  With Wolverine acting as the Grim Reaper (he's gotta be in there somewhere).  But the script, while sparse, is well controlled, and allows for a smooth flow and buyable execution (pun intended).  There are a handful of brilliant moments, utilizing the story’s conceit to its fullest and while I can’t celebrate Hurwitz for his conceptual originality, I can applaud him for writing a very successful comic book one-shot, if nevertheless one that mirrors a dozen others that have come before it.

Artist Marcelo Frusin  (Loveless, Hellblazer) is, of course, the truest merit of the book, the comic’s artwork far surpassing anything the story so much as strives for.  Frusin handles fully  the visuals (pencils, inks, and colors to boot) and so the look of the book is wholly under his control, and the integrity is obvious: the story’s most powerful moments are due to the art, pitch-perfect and in line with Hurwitz’s intentions.  Frusin glorifies the beats of Hurwitz’s script to a surreal degree, with a blend of noir, horror, and classical aesthetics.

Deathsong is a very well-done book, but it follows a formula that's been “well-done” many a time before, there being no conceivable need for a company to produce such a carbon-copy clone yet again, not without some sort of development in the fundamental conceit.  Hurwitz may be a fine writer, and he certainly doesn’t suffer within the comic book format itself, but he lacks the creativity and innovation that comic readers expect, even from a crime comic, especially from a super-hero comic that’s only dressing up for the night as a crime comic.

So the novelist-cum-comic-book-scrivener revolution continues apace, and while I’m uncertain whether it’s editorial constraints, or a flaw in the mainstream prose-novelist mentality that’s most to blame, so far the results have been nothing but uninspired.  The (going on) eight-year theory that novelists must bring forth elements of storytelling that comic writers have forever found elusive is still, I think, a viable one, though either a particular guidance is needed, a lack of editorial stipulation, or merely a more widespread choice in prose stylist should be considered.  Because thus far, the theory isn’t getting the support it needs to remain a theory.

There are notable exceptions, Greg Rucka the most prominent, though to be fair, even he tends to lose his way when wrangling with concepts too far afield of the more down-to-earth, political or vigilante-based super-heroics; Charlie Huston can also manage marvels, though his Ultimates Annual was definite proof, once again, that no, let the bookworm stick to scripting the street-side costumed crusader.

The unobstructed creativity of comics mixed with the more compelling approach to psychology, character, and theme found within novels: together, we’d have more than just a sole, single masterpiece of comics literature like Watchmen.  We’d have hundreds, thousands, and they’d be each and every one revered industry-wide, no matter the medium.  Now that is a bar worth striving for.