Five to Get You Started: Loose Ends, Bog Bodies, Last of the Independents, A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance, The Great British Bump-Offf

Surprise post! Later in the week will be the first scheduled post that talks about Sin City, Criminal, 100 Bullets, Scalped, and Stray Bullets but I wanted to sneak this one in.

One of my all-time favorite film books is Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head by Mike Wilkins and Stefan Hammond (1996). It was an early look at Hong Kong genre cinema,  written at a time when films from that country were starting to break out to a wider audience in The West.

The title combines two film titles in a provocative way to draw the attention of readers but also to offer a kind of shorthand clue as to what could be expected. I decided to try something similar for this newletter and took a couple of crime comic titles and combined them in a way that (hopefully) tells the audience what it is about.

Another thing that I love about the book is that the very first chapter is called “Ten That Rip”. Right at the beginning, it just gives you a good cross section of titles to check out before digging deeper into the topic. The rest of the book offers tons more recommendations but readers can easily get started right out of the gate. More single subject books should do this and I wanted to do something similar.

In the spirit of that book, here are five crime comics titles to get you started. You can go grab them right now if you want and start reading them.

Title: Loose Ends
Writer(s): Jason Latour
Artist(s): Rico Renzi
Publisher: Image
Availability: In print (print, digital, digital library services)

The Middle East war machine has chewed Sonny up and spit him back out. He’s banged up and bruised, frayed around the edges and forever damaged. No hero’s welcome for a modern soldier home from fighting in the desert. When this frazzled, exposed nerve of a man returns home he ignites a chain of events that will engulf him and those from his past. Through flashbacks we get to know who these characters are and all of their connections.

The flashbacks are key here because really this story is unfolding across four timelines. And each timeline has its own color palette. There are even panels where two different color palettes are merged to give the reader a greater sense of how things got to that moment or who exactly is involved.

Loose Ends uses the comics medium in an inventive way in service of a compelling crime tale.

Title: Bog Bodies
Writer(s): Declan Shalvey
Artist(s): Gavin Fullerton
Publisher: Image
Availability: In print (print, digital, digital library services)

How many times have we seen the pairing of the older more experienced character with the younger more inexperienced character? It’s a classic crime fiction character set-up. One of the great crime comics, Stray Bullets, opens with a psycho noir version of this set-up.  The pairing pits their age, experience, personalities, and generational understandings of the world together.

In TV terms, these types of stories might be bottle episodes, where the characters have a forced close proximity to each other, usually in a car and/or a remote or strange location. Cut off from the outside world with a seemingly simple job to do. What can go wrong? A lot. The answer is always a lot.

This is a fairly stripped down story so I don’t want to get into plot specifics but if In Bruges meets the Pine Barrens episode of Sopranos sounds interesting (and it should!) Bog Bodies is for you.

Title: Last of the Independents
Writer(s): Matt Fraction
Artist(s): Kieron Dwyer
Publisher: Image
Availability: In print (print, digital, digital library services)

Last of the Independents does exactly what it says on the tin. A ragtag trio of robbers pull a job. The score is bigger than expected. The mob wants its money back and the whole thing turns into this cowboys vs mobsters in the desert showdown. It’s a straightforward setup that is executed flawlessly.

“These kind of post_Hawksian pulp potboilers had ornery dudes in the middle over their heads , alongside women as ferocious and sharp as they were. Friendship and loyalty were paramount. Good guys honored their word. Everyone competed with one another all the time. Crime usually was involved. A gun. Drinking. Stewing was for eating. Taking a punch was paramount. Stuff like that. And most of all, the leading men all had to be gnarly, old, and a little seedy and way improbably. Preferably they were over-the-hill entirely.

Because for a minute there in the seventies, everyone could be an action star.” — Matt Fraction

The story itself is nimble and moves along at a very quick pace. The color palette is black and white with this yellowish/brownish overlay that befits the desert setting, like a dust cloud haze enveloping these characters and their romantic standoff against the evil faceless gangsters.

Even if Matt Fraction didn’t spell it out with a list of movie titles, Last of the Independents wears its influences proudly and on the page. If you like 1970’s crime flicks you’re going to love this.

Obviously Last of the Independents should be paired with Charley Varrick but I would also recommend Thief for the independent operator vs the bigger outfit ideas that are baked into it (then go read "My Money Is Still In Your Pocket: The Death of the American Dream in Michael Mann’s Thief" over at Bright Wall/Dark Room).

Title: A Righteous Thirst For Vengeance
Writer(s): Rick Remeder
Artist(s): Andre Lima Araujo
Publisher: Image
Availability: In print (print|digital|digital library services)

Our protagonist is an unassuming everyman. We meet him catching a bus and getting rained on after he decides to help an older couple. He’s heading somewhere to do something but we don’t yet know what. It’s like a mundane in medias res start. The mission that he’s on will take him off of his normal path and out of his normal routine. We’re catching him at the moment of deviation from his normal life. One single act pushes him into parts of the world he’s never known before, corners of the world he never knew existed, and into areas of power that are going to push back hard at this interference.

A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance takes ideas that are in parts of the modern digital zeitgeist and runs them through a pulpy, violent, fast paced, action thriller, genre story. There are man on the run, protector, revenge, kind of Lone Wolf & Cub story elements mixed with ideas, current events, (and people) like the dark web, off the grid commune living, and features a big baddie that looks a little like Steve Bannon, sounds a little like Trump, and commits Jeffrey Epstein level crimes.

A Righteous Thirst for Violence takes some unexpected dark turns and winds up in a place that is far from where it started. It’s worth your time to take that journey and see where it goes.

Title: The Great British Bump-Off
Writer(s): John Allison
Artist(s): Max Sarin
Publisher: Dark Horse
Availability: In print (print|digital|digital library services)

Many crime comics work in a darker, more serious mode. But more light hearted and comedic modes work really well for the genre too. Finally, I wanted to introduce a more comedic crime comic into the mix. It’s fun, it’s funny, and it’s for a more general audience.

Cooking shows have been around forever and cooking reality shows have been around almost as long as the format has. Behind the scenes, the reality show format is a high pressure environment populated by people desperate for things like money, fame, or attention. The people running these reality programs don’t always have the contestants best interests in mind (because their primary concern is the show). During the COVID pandemic lockdowns certain shows would pop off in popularity as people were watching the same things at the same times and talking about them on social media. One of those that became more popular during that time was The Great British Bake Off. 

A reality show is a great environment for these mysteries where people are brought together in a single, high pressure location and start getting bumped off one by one. Each murder reveals histories, secrets, motivations, and hidden relationships. The Great British Bump-Off does exactly that when mysterious and deadly acts start happening to contestants on a cooking show. At one point a character points out that seasons of these shows have character types and that they have all been cast to fill a type. This broad presentation creates a cast of colorful characters that mesh perfectly with the comedic style of the story.

In addition to characters heightened in a comedic way, the challenges create opportunities for sanctioned buffonery. One of the early challenges is to “Make a celebration cake for an event special to you”. Here are some of the cakes.

The Great British Bump-Off rips along at a fast pace and stays light on its feet in an entertaining way. It’s a lot of fun. 

For a real life pairing of cooks and crime, the late great Anthony Bourdain wrote a couple of crime novels that are worth checking out: Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo, and Bobby Gold. Hugh Laurie’s comedic thriller The Gun Seller is worth checking out too. The Great British Bump-Off should appeal to fans of shows like Only Murders in the Building.