Scalped #2

"Indian Country" (Part 2 of 3)
written by Jason Aaron
art by R. M. Guéra

Dashiell Bad Horse's new life is almost defined by duplicity.  And that's not only because of his job as an undercover FBI agent embedded in the Prairie Rose Tribal Police Force, crime boss Red Crow's de facto band of lackeys with badges.  Duplicity is a way of life, sometimes the only way of living, on the reservation.  To the outside world, Lincoln Red Crow is the face of the tribe, but he speaks eloquently out of both sides of his mouth.

Turns out, Bad Horse speaks foully out of both sides of his.  His aggressive don't-give-a-shit temperament has won him no friends in among Red Crow's men, and his growing displeasure in his assignment and his hostile disdain for authority make him persona non grata at the FBI.  He may be a good agent, but he's not a popular one.  He belongs in between Washington and Prairie Rose, mistrusted by many FBI agents, including Newsome, because he's a "redskin punk" (Scalped #2:1) and suspicious to the reservation's criminal elite because he's Gina Bad Horse's son who's been away from South Dakota for far to long to really be local.  A man between.

In a skeevy bar with a jukebox that has what must be the finest selection of depressive anthems, Bad Horse meets his old flame Carol Ellroy, daughter of Red Crow himself, now married to a jealous, abusive asshole in order to survive.  She's the damage Dashiell left behind him, the scarred, hollowed out shell of what she could have been and used to be with him.

"I'm tellin' ya, kid, just one look at you, and I know...  ...somewhere out there is a blaze of fuckin' glory...  ...with your name written all over it."  (22)

But only one week in Prairie Rose and suspects, with his cover blown, he's already the target of Red Crow's assassins, a crew of heavily scarred mercenaries with a fetish for bloodshed.  A set-up in an abandoned building for only Bad Horse and Falls Down, badly outnumbered.  Agent Bad Horse may very well be right.  But then again, if not, then the shadowy horseman who stumbles on his rendezvous with the FBI may very well out him as well.  Falls Down is right:  the hail of bullets is inevitable; the only question is when.

[April 2007]

Crossing Midnight #4

"Cut Here"
(Part 1 of 2)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Mark Pennington

Like his sister Toshi, who accepted the invitation of Aratsu the "Master of Swords," Kaikou Hara accepts service with a stranger to save his parents.  Like the needles and pins she presides over, Nidoru is lean and sharp, but there's an elegance to her, a willful honor foreign to Aratsu, one that recognizes and values Kai's right to choose.  She is masterless, a soldier alone.  And like the ronin, to which she owes much, she seeks revenge for the death of her rightful master Asirosamiro at the hands of the usurper Aratsu.

Nidoru is fearsome and her stitching quite gruesome despite its deftness, but she is so far honorable, and her refusal to bow before the disloyal bully Aratsu speaks well for her.  But she belongs to a world of fable and magic with mysterious and unfamiliar rules.  She speaks with relish and poetry, though she herself may not know it, but it is this beauty as much as anything that makes her and her world so intimidating.

"Where does the boundary fall, after all?  The point of crossing?  It is in a different place for each of us."  (Crossing Midnight #4: 7)

While Kai falls slowly into this strange world as he and his new ally repair his family, Toshi tumbles wildly into hers, a nightmare of Aratsu's making.  Like the intimidation and threats he used to elicit her service, a power play against her will with only death as an alternative, Aratsu takes her very identity:  her name and her will.  He cuts away her past and her future, allowing her to live only in a moment of his choosing.  It's a violation difficult to see coming, and difficult to see a way back from.

[April 2007]

Scalped #1

"Indian Country" (Part 1 of 3)
written by Jason Aaron
art by R. M. Guéra

He's not a large man, but he's been causing a lot of trouble for the local tribal thugs who strut around the Reservation like cocks in a barnyard.  Eventually, he's sufficiently outnumbered to be restrained, beaten, and brought before the tribal chief and crime boss Red Crow:  President of the Oglala Tribal Council, Sheriff of the Tribal Police Force, Chairman of the Prairie Rose Planning Committee, Treasurer of the Highway Safety Program, Managing Director of the new casino.  To the FBI agents attempting to make a case against him, the list looks a little different:  most powerful crime figure in three counties, who "traffics in methamphetamine, illegal arms and prostitution, runs his own private army of murderous thugs, and generally rules over this reservation like a medieval warlord" (Scalped #1: 22).

In one of the most chilling sequences in the medium, Red Crow interviews this prodigal son handcuffed to his office chair, encircled by two pacing pit bulls, with a freshly scalped corpse on the floor just next to him, and the knife responsible dug into the desk still dripping with blood.  Lincoln Red Crow might just kill him with so little fanfare he might not remember next Tuesday, but instead he offers him a job.  And so one of the most enviably named protagonists in literary history arrives back home after fifteen years to a badge in the Tribal Police Force:  Dashiell Bad Horse.

Inspired by the 1975 conflict that led to the shooting of two FBI agents on Reservation land, Aaron re-constructs a fictional history that capitalizes on the real animosity, willful misunderstanding and cultural hostility that seethed between American Indians and federal agencies in those decades.  But he's more interested in the current fallout of those mutual failures:  corrupt politicians and law enforcement, drug trafficking, epidemic drug and alcohol abuse, rampant poverty, and cultural activists increasingly willing to employ terrorism.  Aaron's political and cultural criticism is scathing but refreshingly unsimplified, and his implications go far beyond the borders of his fictional reservation.

"Do you know who we are?"
"Buncha football mascots?  I don't give a fuck."  (2)

But if the unjust treatment of American Indians by the federal government, the exploitation of stereotypes in American pop culture, and the persistent racism exhibited by people on and off the Reservation would perhaps earn some sympathy for the tribal residents, their unchecked hostility, willingness to exploit both what little federal aid they receive and each other for individual gain, and the complete ineptitude of local organizations and institutions negate that good will.

[March 2007]

Crossing Midnight #3

"The Shrine"
(Part 3 of 3)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Mark Pennington

The gulf between Kaikou and Toshi continues to grow.  As Kai is semi-abducted into another world by a poem, his lost childhood friend, and a dragon demi-god, Toshi steals a pistol from the local bad-boy and drug dealer.

Carey's pacing for his series is deliberate, giving away almost nothing in cheap exposition.  We readers, like his characters, discover this world and its mysterious stakes as Kai and Toshi slip farther and farther into this world that they don't understand.  Aratsu's smile at the end of the issue is all the more sinister because we, like Toshi, do not know exactly why or how his plans are coming to fruition.

"She though she saw Aratsu smile as he beckoned her to follow him.  And it seemed likely enough.  Because everything had come full circle.  And everything hd turned out exactly as he wished it."  (Crossing Midnight #3: 23)

It's all the more fearsome in light of the foreboding warnings Kaikou receives earlier in the issue.  Less a warning than a threat of death, Rinjin, the dragon demi-god, makes clear his desire that Toshi refuse Aratsu's final request, which of course she doesn't to save her mother's life.  Rinjin's information about Aratsu is useful if still somewhat vague and difficult to piece together, but it's Police Constables Sato and Yamada's crystal clear note, an unmistakable allusion to the unusual birth of the Hara twins on either side of midnight, that really rattles Kaikou. 

By the end of "The Shrine," Toshi has foolishly accepted the terms of her father's sacrifice before their birth, agreeing to become servant to Aratsu.  The mysterious "Master of Swords," as he calls himself, brings the story well into a world adjacent but entirely unfamiliar to the world in which Toshi and Kaikou were raised.  And Kai already feels the dissonance, the loss of normalcy which nearly brings him to tears.

[March 2007]

Crossing Midnight #2

"The Shrine"
(Part 2 of 3)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Mark Pennington

Kaikou Hara is now in a world of magic and fable, a storyteller's world.  Following the brutal dismemberment of his dog Sen, Kai must face the suspicions of the police, the reckless retaliation of his sister for the mysterious blade-wielder responsible, and the inescapable feeling that he's being pulled into something he doesn't at all understand.  Toshi may be impervious to blades, but Kai seems to have an uncanny ability to deflect the magic wielded by the strange samurai trying to abduct Kai's sister as his servant.

Seeking answers to the samurai Aratsu's claim that the twins' father promised him Toshi long ago, Kai asks his grandmother, who remembers her son's prayer to the kami of their family's little wooden shrine.  She then relates the story of how their ancestor Nijira Hara was given the shrine by a strange nobleman in exchange for bringing her husband Hisaneo home unharmed by any sword.  Carey's prose excels in storytelling of this variety.  There's an elegance and simplicity to his exposition that elevates it above its peers and makes it particularly suitable for these magical fables.

Crossing Midnight #2's finest surprise, however, comes in its final pages, when Toshi and Kai's childhood friend Saburo, lost in the world beyond the Torii Arch when they were kids reappears looking the same age he was then.  Kai reads a poem aloud, which tethers him to his world, before he is transported into the presence of Saburo's master, a dragon shown only in shadow.

[February 2007]

The Astounding Wolf-Man #1

written by Robert Kirkman
art by Jason Howard

If The Astounding Wolf-Man has something new to offer the werewolf genre, it isn't in this issue.  Kirkman's CEO-turned-werewolf is as conventional as they come.  The incident triggering his supernatural shift is unseen and, at least here, mostly unknown—a "bear attack" on a family camping trip in Montana, you know, where the werewolves live.  His transformations are also mostly unseen—muscle spasms and profuse sweating.  His full-moon romps are as uneventful as they are conventional—rooftop frolicking and rabbit hunting.  As a monster and would-be superhero—the direction suggested by the series title—I suppose it's important to keep the Gary-wolf from truly incriminating and compromising himself, but it makes for little suspense and low stakes.

As a human character Gary Hampton is a little more interesting.  Although he mostly embodies the frazzled-financially-imperiled-businessman stereotype, with his conference calls to Asia and his corporate woes despite living comfortably in a large estate with a family maid, his relationship with his teenage daughter is earnest and believable.  [Notably, the one surprising moment in The Astounding Wolf-Man's first issue comes on the tennis court with Chloe, when despite his newly acquired wolf blood, Gary fails miserably in keeping pace with his daughter in the match.]  He may be a besieged businessman, whose company is flagging and whose month-long absence has cost his corporate prospects significantly, but he still prioritizes his time with her.  Similarly, his banter with his wife seems sincere and affectionate.

Gary Hampton's affability is, in fact, the issue's most refreshing detail.  Unlike his angst-ridden wolfish predecessors, Gary is humorously upbeat, a character trait that seems to carry over into his wolf personality, whose adventures seem driven more by a sense of fun and frivolity than by an aggressiveness.  This twist, more than any other, sparks a little potential in the series, a window of opportunity to eschew the more conventional werewolf tales of inevitable tragedy for something else.

If Kirkman's wolf-man is a little underwhelming, Jason Howard's is not.  There's no individual detail that's all that impressive, nor are the edges of Howard's monster all that complicated.  However, the impression the Gary-wolf, a kind of wolf/gorilla hybrid, imposes is substantial.

[July 2007, digital]

Crossing Midnight #1

"The Shrine"
(Part 1 of 3)
written by Mike Carey
pencils by Jim Fern
inks by Rob Hunter

After their father prays, at the insistence of his mother, a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb, to a family shrine of a forgotten Kami for the healthy birth of his child, Kai and his entirely unanticipated twin sister Toshi are born, just on either side of midnight.  As the children grow older, magic seems to find them.  As young children, they lose their comrade Saburo in a magic world on the other side of the Torii Arch before it unexpectedly seals.  And a few years later, Toshi discovers her immunity to blades, which try as she might, will not pierce her.  Then, as a teen, a master of blades Aratsu, a figure Kai remembers from the magic world, appears to claim Toshi as payment for their father's prayer and promise.  Because she refuses him, he eviscerates the family dog, and favorite of Toshi, Sen, before warning her he will return.

Few comics writers show as much storytelling verve as Carey, and Crossing Midnight is no exception.  Make no mistake, issue #1 is mostly exposition, the story of their birth and childhood as told by elder twin Kai.  Until its final pages, it's all foundation, but it's a foundation that gestures at a detailed and nuanced mythology of battling Kami, humans stolen into magic worlds, and twins born into different worlds, with different powers and on either side of midnight.  Largely because Kai is our narrator, he is far and away the more sympathetic of the siblings, and if the other members of the Hara family are sensitive to the moods and feelings of the others, none seem to show it.  Yasuo's trouble at work, and it seems to be quite dangerous, makes him withdrawn, continually anxious, and subsequently dismissive of others.  Miya's frustration at her husband's withdrawal and apparent apathy makes her shrewish.  Toshi's physical invulnerability makes her edgy, aggressive, and defiant.  They are, in other words, a family, and recognizably such.

The relative success of Crossing Midnight's opening chapter will, as a consequence of its exposition-heavy storytelling, be dependent on how the details of its opening bear out in the next few issues.  As an art team, Fern and Hunter aren't particularly impressive in this one.  Faces are rendered beautifully, with fine and graceful lines, but backgrounds are flat and washed out.  The exception is the world through the Torii Arch, which is strange, expansive and with a depth not otherwise found in issue #1.  If, as I suspect, subsequent episodes of the series take place in this or other alternate worlds, the drabness of the human world may be as much as aesthetic choice as not.  Either way, the interior art is faced with the unenviable task of matching J. H. Williams III's wonderfully layered and colorfully lush cover illustration, which is daring in its perfect symmetry.

[January 2007]