VIOLENT LOVE: BARBIERE AND SANTOS' PULP CRIME THRILLER

Daisy Jane and Rock Bradley are bank robbers, operating in the Southwest in the 1970s. But Frank Barbiere's story opens 1987, with retired US Marshal Lou telling their tale to young Penny, flashing back to the late Sixties and early Seventies, to Daisy Jane's path into a life of crime, and to his own intersection with her and rock while on the track of the notorious La Jauria drug cartel. Violent Love is violent, and there is love, but mostly it is a fast-paced thriller that claims to be 'inspired by true events'.

It's not hard to see what some of those events might be, but Violent Love also wears its influences proudly. Not least music. The opening epigram comes from the punk band Beach Slang, and while that meant nothing to me, when you read the lyrics the art by Victor Santos can carry you away in those kinds of beats. In fact, you could look at this work as a sort of mix between elements of films as diverse as Badlands, The Outfit or The Grifters. The mix comes from the noirish sense of doom and the pulpy story-telling of Seventies crime movies, crossed with the anarchic energy of punk, music of a more violent sort of crime era. The closest comparisons would be to Carl Franklin's One False Move, or, perhaps even closer, to the now-forgotten crime-spree thriller set in Texas, Love And A .45, starring a young Renee Zellweger.

This is not to say Violent Love is simply derivative, but that it wears its influences, and their eras well. It's also telling that Image Comics bills the story as “crime/romance”, and the cover of the fifth issue of the original series is done beautifully in the style of a romance comic. In the sense that comics are our modern pulp magazines, or pulp novels, it is perhaps inevitable that they should have discovered an affinity for the story-telling of violent noirish B-movie crime. I've praised the work of Ed Brubaker here many times, and Barbiere bears comparison with him, though with Santos' art, he moves in a more dynamic, faster-paced kind of accelerated story-telling. It's a compelling read.

Violent Love Vol. 1: Stay Dangerous

by Frank J Barbiere & Victor Santos

Image Comics 2017, $9.99 ISBN 9781534300446

FLITHY RICH: AZZARELLO AND SANTOS GO NOIR

Filthy Rich comes complete with blurbs from George Pelecanos and Meagan Abbott, and it doesn't get much more noirish than that--impressive enough that my wife actually gave me this copy for my birthday! And she does not do comic books. Brian Azzarello has shown in 100 Bullets that he's absorbed a full menu of late 50s and early 60s noir, and artist Victor Santos' art, which seems heavily influenced by Frank Miller as much as 50s black and white films and maybe Bernie Krigstein, suits the story very well.

There is a fine line between hommage and derivation, and the graphic novel format often winds up drawing heavily on both; in writing terms they are short stories, while in story format they are presented more like novels--the same sort of boundaries you might place on film, but even moreso without the giant screen and dark cinema to encompass the viewer. So although the outlines of the story are familiar, what makes it work so well is Azarello's combining of angles: the failed athlete turned car salesman thrown into the nightlife milieu is not only redolent of noir, it carries the undercurrents of the era, the sort of thing you get in Philip K Dick's mainstream novels, in everything from Death of A Salesman to Glengarry Glen Ross, the sort of thing that kept Gold Medal books in business fo so long. Junk Junkin, the former star football player who was accused of shaving points in college and then saw his pro career disappear to injury before it even started, is a desperate, empty man, with a half-track brain and a one-track mind--the perfect noir hero.

If anything, the story is even more desperate than Junkin himself, and that's where Romero's art cranks up the pace to a frenzied level. It resolves itself the way noir ought to, the way it has to, the only way it possibly can, in its real underbelly of a world. Filthy Rich is filthy, and it's rich noir, and what more can you ask for?