99 Days

Written by Matteo Casali
Art by Kristian Donaldson

I read 99 Days, one of the Vertigo Crime graphic novels in two sittings, and something strange occurred overnight with this book.  When I read the first 75 pages or so, I felt that writer Matteo Casali was simply going through the motions of touching on any number of standard plot points in a police procedural, or a piece of fiction touching on the Rwandan genocide.  I wasn't that impressed with the book.

Then, I picked it up to finish the last hundred pages, and found that either my mood changed my perception of the book, or that I had put it down in exactly the spot where Casali turned the book around into something that attempted to grapple with some very important issues.  I found that I became pretty immersed in the book from that point on, and it stayed with me the rest of the evening after I finished it.  That's kind of rare.

This story is set in Los Angeles in 2010.  A young woman has been discovered in a South Central neighbourhood hacked to death with a machete.  Two LAPD detectives, Antoine Boyd and Valeria Torres have been assigned to the case, which quickly spirals out of their control.  When it is learned that the victim was the ex-girlfriend of a leader of the LA Crips, who had since been dating a Blood, a gang war sparks off.  While all of this is going on, someone keeps killing people with his machete.

This could have stayed a pretty conventional police procedural at this point, but we readers learn (as, eventually, does his partner) that Boyd was an orphan of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.  More than that, he was a participant, forced at the age of twelve to kill Tutsi's (despite the fact that his closest friend was one) and perform other degrading acts.  Years later, after much therapy, Boyd has his life together, despite having to take medication to aid his moods, and being generally regarded as a 'quota hire' by his colleagues.

Needless to say, this case is bringing up some issues for Boyd, and the way in which he reacts to it was not what I expected.  Casali does a good job of twisting the plot in a few directions over the course of this story.

What I most appreciated were the parallels between Rwanda and LA.  Sure, the '99 days' bit is a little too obvious, but what I most liked was the American shock radio jockey whose reports on the gang war echoed the open encouragement and incitement of genocide that set things off in Kigali.  Casali has clearly done a ton of research in writing this book, and that's always appreciated, especially since I've done my own reading on this topic (Note:  read Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda; it's incredible).

Kristian Donaldson's work on this book is also interesting.  He isn't given the space and freedom to go wild, as he did in Brian Wood's Supermarket, instead keeping his pencils tight and in line with the rest of the Vertigo Crime books.  My favourite scene in the book has to be all Donaldson though - Boyd frequently sees the shade of his childhood friend out of the corner of his eye - in this one place, what he thought was his friend was really a Shepard Fairey Obey poster.  It's a cool, if throwaway, moment.

This is one of the best of the Vertigo Crime books, an imprint that seems to have disappeared, as I don't think any new books have been published in this line in quite a while.  They frequently disappointed, but I had the feeling that Vertigo was finally starting to get the mix right on these books.

A History of Violence

Written by John Wagner
Art by Vince Locke

It's pretty much impossible for a comics fan to have read everything.  I saw this recent Vertigo Crime reprinting of the old Paradox Press title A History of Violenceand was more than a little surprised to realize I'd never read it before (nor had I seen the moviedirected by David Cronenberg, despite the fact that I went through a huge Cronenberg phase back in my university days).  I figured it was time to address this - for the book at least, if not the movie.

This is a pretty decent book.  I was a big fan of John Wagner's work on Batman (written with Alan Grant), and have long recognized Vince Locke as having an important place in edgy, intelligent comics.

The book opens in some small town, where a couple of petty crooks decide to hold up Tom McKenna's diner, not expecting McKenna to fight back.  When it's all over, McKenna finds himself a local hero, with his story even making national news.  And this leads to some problems, since McKenna has been living under an assumed name for twenty years, and has been hiding from the mob.

It's not long before a trio of mob enforcers come sniffing around, and McKenna has to confront his past, and tell his wife and children about how he used to live his life.  The family drama stuff is handled very nicely, and it's easy to see why this book was chosen for film adaptation; it has all the pacing of a good Hollywood thriller.

Locke's work is nice, but much looser than I would have expected.  Much of the book looks like Guy Davis penciled it without an inker.  This approach works for most of it, but there are a few scenes where things could have been a little clearer.

Noche Roja

Written by Simon Oliver
Art by Jason Latour

I found this entry to the Vertigo Crime imprint to be enjoyable, if wholly predictable.  Noche Roja is set on the Mexican/American border, and is concerned with the disappearance and murder of a number of young female maquiladora workers (who are strangely also referred to as maquiladoras, although I've never heard it termed that way before).  Jack Cohen, your typical down in his dumps PI is hired to look into the murders, and finds that the whole sordid business is tied to politicians in both countries.

Cohen, of course, has a history with law and order in Mexico, and is himself dealing with ghosts from the last time he crossed the border.  He works with a young human rights crusader, and the standard scenes of things like them getting chased through the barrio appear on schedule.

There's nothing wrong with this book - it has a compelling enough story, and nice, noir-ish art by Jason Latour.  It just doesn't particularly impress either.  This book treads ground that is familiar to me.  Roberto Bolano's brilliant 2666 concerns itself with the murders in Northern Mexico (although Bolano doesn't limit his scope to just 3 or 4 murders), while William T. Vollmann, in his dauntingly exhaustive Imperial, tried to gain access to a number of maquilas.  While I feel that Simon Oliver did some research for this graphic novel, I almost feel better informed for having read only these two books.

A Sickness in the Family

Written by Denise Mina
Art by Antonio Fuso

This is one Vertigo Crime book that ended up being pretty creepy.  In A Sickness in the Family, a British family of means disintegrates utterly and completely.  The Usher family (a little heavy-handed with the naming) is full of the simmering resentments that most families have, and just about everyone in the family has a secret, but as the book opens during Christmas dinner, they are more or less functioning.  Sure, the parents are in counseling for the wife's extra-marital affairs, the daughter is unhappy that her father isn't funding her business venture, and the older brother is hiding a pretty big secret.  The youngest son is adopted, and has not ever been fully welcomed by the whole family.  The aging grandmother is mellowing nicely, but everyone else remembers what a terror she used to be.

During this dinner, the couple that lives downstairs get into a massive fight that culminates in both their deaths.  After that, the father decides to open a huge hole in the middle of his house to build a staircase to the recently acquired ground floor, and things start to go weird.  One by one, the members of the Usher family meet accidents and have their secrets revealed, as the dwindling number of survivors turn on each other.  There may be a supernatural element to what's going on, or the explanation may be more pedestrian than that.

Mina does a great job of ratcheting up the tension with each new chapter, and as the list of suspects shrinks, everyone begins to look more and more guilty.  The story is told through the perspective of the adopted teenage son, who is pretty much the only nice person in the comic.  Fuso's art is serviceable, but doesn't really stand out.  Still, this is a pretty impressive piece of work from an imprint of an imprint that keeps improving.

Rat Catcher

Written by Andy Diggle
Art by Victor Ibañez


I think Rat Catcher may be the best of the Vertigo Crime books I've read.  Andy Diggle show the same penchant for twists and turns that he demonstrated regularly in The Losers, and keeps the reader a step behind him for most of the book.

This is a difficult book to discuss without spoiling some of the surprises, but I'll do my best.  The title refers to a legend among the FBI and US Marshals Service in Texas, who have had many witnesses die on them before they are able to testify or turn state's evidence. A couple of agents believe that these mysterious deaths were perpetrated by a single killer, who has been able to avoid detection.

When this book opens, an FBI safe house is burning, and one man, who has been shot, comes running out.  It turns out that a new witness was in the safe house, along with up to three agents.  We're not sure what happened, but the one agent's partner, Agent Bourdon, believes that the Rat Catcher is responsible.  The story that follows is taut and quick moving, and very well illustrated by Victor Ibañez. 

Fogtown

Written by Andersen Gabrych
Art by Brad Rader

I'm of two minds when it comes to this entry in the Vertigo Crime imprint.  There is a lot I liked about Fogtown, but there were also elements of the plot that I found pretty irritating.

Fogtown is about Frank Grissel, who is introduced as your typical genre hardboiled private detective, in San Francisco in 1953.  The thing is, Frank is a homosexual, and is very deep in the closet about the whole thing, which leads him to be a jerk to his girlfriend (and, we find out later, his family).  This is the interesting part of the book, as Frank has to navigate his own secrets in the course of solving a case.

The problem with this book is the case itself.  It's clear that Gabrych saw the actual crime part of the book as secondary to exploring Frank's character, and that's fine, but the main plot, with its dead prostitutes, weird priests, dead bookkeepers, gigantic bodyguards, and transsexual smuggling is too overly complicated and interconnected to really work.  I wish that Gabrych had tried for a less ambitious plotline, and spent more time just working on Frank and his family.

Brad Rader's art is pretty good, although there are a few scenes that are hard to follow.  In all, this is a middle of the road entry to the Vertigo Crime Library, but it definitely had the potential to be one of the most interesting.

The Executor

Written by Jon Evans
Art by Andrea Mutti

I'm of two minds when it comes to this graphic novel.  The Executor is about an ex-NHL goon who retired early due to a knee injury.  He gets a phone call telling him that his old high-school girlfriend had died, and that she unexpectedly named him the executor of her estate, which forces him to return to Elora New York, the small town where he grew up, and where he is still seen by many as a local hero.

Shortly upon arriving in town, he begins to expect that the girl's death wasn't an accident, and he begins digging around for some facts.  Elora is a typical small upstate New York town, with a Mohawk Reserve on its border.  It seems that the ex-girlfriend was dating a member of the band, and was helping the tribe with some land claims thing (which is never elucidated upon).  As Joe, our hero, distributes her meager funds to her inheritors, he meets with Dia, a local Mohawk crime boss who lives in a guarded estate on Reserve property, and apparently smuggles stuff to and from Canada.  Dia had a little brother who was killed a long time ago, and Joe seems to know something about it.

From there, the book becomes quite intriguing, as Joe's secrets are cast into new light by other information, and the plot thickens to involve a missing man accused of kidnapping his daughter, a pedophile ring, an abandoned mine, and years of lying.  It's maybe more than the book can support, and there are many places where the writing feels illogical or the pacing is off.

Not helping matters is the art of Andrea Mutti.  He's very good at drawing figures, but I often found his storytelling to be a little confusing and unclear.  I know that Vertigo is increasingly relying on artists from Italy to draw their books (I always assume it's an economic thing), but I think that Mutti should have perhaps spent a little more time researching or referencing the things he's drawing.  The hockey players appear to be playing with field hockey sticks at times, and there's a scene where much is made about how good a pumpkin pie is, yet the pie shown has a layer of crust on top.  These are all minor quibbles, but they were enough to toss me out of the story a couple of times.

Still, this is a decent read.  I found that I got pretty absorbed in the story, and didn't want to stop reading until I knew the ending.  This is Evans's first comic from what I can tell, and it's always good to see a local writer get some attention.

The Bronx Kill

Written by Peter Milligan
Art by James Romberger

Now this is exactly what I was expecting when the Vertigo Crime line launched.  Bronx Kill is a perfect example of a crime comics graphic novel.  It's intelligent, suspenseful, very well-paced, and has a couple of surprises.

The book stars Martin Keane, the only son in a family with at least four generations of service in the New York Police Department.  The book opens with scenes of Martin's great grandfather getting murdered in the Bronx Kill, the wasteland surrounding the stream that separates the Bronx from Manhattan, and then jumps to young Martin being told about it by his father.  At that point, Martin realizes that he will never become a cop, and instead grows up to be a second-rate novelist.

Early in the book, Martin marries Erin, an artist and school teacher, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Martin's grandmother, who mysteriously disappeared, abandoning Martin's father.  There is plenty of animosity and disappointment between Martin and his Dad, and his wife's constant curiosity about the family history does not help things much.

After receiving scathing reviews of his second novel (Martin Amis was particularly cruel), Martin is lost for a while, before he starts to get a notion from his wife's queries that leads him to Ireland for four months of research.  Shortly after his return, Erin goes missing one night, and Martin is plunged into a world of suspicion and distrust.

Milligan handles Martin's decent beautifully, as he starts to crack up under media scrutiny and police suspicion.  He eventually becomes the main suspect in the case.  Strangely, all of these problems make it easier for him to write, and Milligan keeps cutting from the comic to pages of his first draft.  It's easy for the reader to make connections between Martin's family history and that of Michael Furey, his protagonist.

The art, by Romberger, works well with the story, and I find the format of these books - the thick hard covers with the pulpy newsprint inside, to be irresistible. This is a really good comic.

Area 10

Written by Christos N. Gage
Art by Chris Samnee

When Vertigo launched their Vertigo Crime imprint within an imprint, this is what I was expecting.  This is a straight up serial killer/angry cop story, with a typically atypical Vertigo twist.

Adam Kamen is a detective for the NYPD, who has been following a string of murders caused by a serial killer the press has dubbed "Henry the Eighth", because all that is ever found are the decapitated bodies of the victims.  Kamen is already having a hard time with the case when he gets attacked by a random crazy person, and has a screwdriver driven into the centre of his forehead.

He returns to the job, but is finding that his perceptions have been altered such that he can sometimes get a glimmer of the future.  He and the Department shrink that has been assigned to evaluate his fitness for duty look into the effects of the accidental trepanation he received, and soon learn that the whole thing might be connected to "Henry".

What follows is a police procedural gone slightly off the rails because of the bizarre way in which Adam sees things.  We learn that he has some secrets in his recent past, and stuff starts to get pretty bloody and suspenseful.

I think it's amusing that the best of the Vertigo Crime books is one of the first I've read not written by a 'crime writer'.  Gage is an emerging star of mainstream comics, and has TV experience on shows like Law and Order, but he hasn't written any mystery novels.  Perhaps that's why this is effective; the other writers don't really know what they're doing in this genre.

Gage is joined by Chris Samnee, who is an artist whose work I always enjoy.  His stuff looks great in black and white, and he helps to establish the creepy tone of this book quite nicely.  If you've been turned off this imprint before, this is the book that makes it worth trying again.

The Chill

Written by Jason Starr
Art by Mick Bertilorenzi

So what makes a crime comic a crime comic?  This seems like it should be a simple enough question, but when one starts talking about the Vertigo Crime series, it's one that I think has gone unasked.

My immediate guess would be that a crime comic is a comic that focuses on crime.  Murders, thefts, perhaps even the high-drama world of tax crime.  I wouldn't usually say that a comic about a demon-infested reality show would qualify. And, in the case of this book, I don't know that a story about a pair of immortal druids that practice murderous sexual rites as an easy candidate for a crime book.  Maybe the whole idea is that if a 'crime writer' writes the comic, then it's a crime comic.  Of course, by that logic, Ed Brubaker's run on Captain America would qualify...

Regardless of the strange choice of branding for this book, it's a strange comic in its own right.  To begin with, it never really establishes a clear protagonist.  Sure, there's this older Irish guy who was the first victim of our druidic pair, but for half the book, he just seems crazy.  There's also the cop who is trying to deal with all this, but he's basically a cipher.  The book lacks an emotional centre, and so it becomes a little hard to care about any of the characters or what is going on.  The druid stuff is kind of cool, but the whole mystery aspect just evaporates too quickly to have any real investment in it.

The art is quite serviceable in a faux-Eduardo Risso sort of way.  Bertilorenzi seems to be from the seemingly endless stable of Italian artists that Vertigo has been tapping the last few years.  His stuff is good, but not too special.

Filthy Rich

Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Victor Santos

This is the other 'first book' published under Vertigo's new 'Vertigo Crime' imprint, and it has the benefit of being an actual crime comic, although again, it is not a traditional one.

"Junk" is an ex-football star who never got his chance in the majors, and who has shuffled through life ever since. He's a horrible used car salesman, his only assets being his fleeting brush with fame and his ability in the bedroom. His boss decides he's better suited to keeping an eye on his daughter Vicki, a spoiled rich girl who ends up in the newspapers from time to time, but never for positive reasons. He's not exactly a bodyguard - she's not to know he's there - he's more of a fixer.

Junk is quickly drawn into her world, interacting with her and her friends, as they prowl what I assume is mid-50s New York. This being a crime book, of course something bad happens, and Junk and Vicki both start to look for something more from the other.

It's an interesting premise and set-up, although Azzarello fails somewhat in the execution. The story feels a little too convoluted in places, with a few too many characters that aren't easily differentiated. The art is serviceable, looking like a strange mash-up of Frank Robbins, Eduardo Risso, and Jordi Bernet. On some pages, the art is very realistic, but then a few pages later, it becomes almost cartoonish. The shift can be jarring.

I do like the choice of setting the story in that span of time between the war and the civil rights movement. It allows Azzarello to rely on a number of social constructions that don't exist anymore, which is necessary, because this story could not be set in our instant-media world.

Dark Entries

Written by Ian Rankin
Art by Werther Dell'Edera

This is the first of Vertigo's new "Vertigo Crime" sub-imprint, and I have to say that it's an attractive little book. The spine evokes other crime book imprints, and the cover pops out at you. The paper quality is poor, but that's the type of thing I can overlook.

I don't understand why Vertigo chose to make this comic their first in this new line though, mainly for the reason that it's not a crime comic, and it's not exactly a mystery, as the cover proclaims. It's a John Constantine, haunted mansion, trip to hell comic. As such, it's a decent one. It is definitely not a crime comic though.

This book is written by Ian Rankin, who I suppose knows the difference between crime stories and supernatural stories. He's written a pile of the former, and, to my knowledge, none of the latter (it's probably worth pointing out that this is the first work by him I've ever read, so I might not know what I'm talking about - I did work in a bookstore for four years a decade ago, and I like to make 'High Fidelity' style proclamations from time to time still).

Okay, leaving labels aside, the question is whether or not the book is good. And it is pretty decent. Constantine is hired to enter the closed set of a reality show that deals with fear - contestants occupy a 'haunted' house, and have to face their fears to find a secret room with a treasure in it. The only problem is, the show has gone off the rails, and the contestants are being frightened by things the producers didn't intend. Enter Constantine.

From there, the story follows pretty well-established Hellblazer patterns. There is some connection to a dark time in John's past, and things aren't what they seem. This could easily have been an arc in his series, fitting in at almost any point over the last several years.

Dell'Edera's art is pretty rough in places - I much preferred his work on the too-short lived Loveless series a couple of years ago. At times, I found it difficult to figure out who was who, and that always detracts from a story.