Normally, as soon as people start talking about how much they like
tough guy-things (thus intimating that they are tough guys themselves),
I discover within myself a sudden and overwhelming desire to go
to sleep. I mean, I like football and good-looking women and old
Clint Eastwood movies just as much as the next guy, but not when
it's being shoved down my throat simply to prove how overactive
another guy's testosterone factory is.
That sums up my initial reaction to LAST OF THE INDEPENDENTS. While
it was in production and at the time it was solicited, it was played
up as an old school hardcore manly-man action thriller on paper,
in an age when such things have supposedly been sacrificed to the
gods of political correctness and oversensitivity. If even the press
material bored me, I figured I wouldn't make it past page five.
Couldn't have been more wrong. If there's one thing this book ain't,
it's boring.
Cole Caudle is a rough-and-tumble middle-aged man with an improbably
hot girlfriend and a slow-minded but mountainous sidekick named
Billy. When they pull a bank job meant to be their ticket to retirement
and the good life, they find themselves on the run and hunted by
a vicious Las Vegas mob lieutenant.
That sounds pretty cookie-cutter, I know, but writer Matt Fraction
makes it work with snappy dialogue and a plot that never slows down.
In fact, considering we're talking about a 100-page graphic novel
here, the book is a pretty quick read. Fraction doesn't completely
forsake narrative captions like most modern comic writers do, but
he's got a talent for boiling even those down to their essence.
A page full of narration moves just as quickly as one full of equally
honed dialogue.
(Best line of the book: "No need for sex talk, sailor. You
had me at 'faggot'.")
Cole and Company are anti-heroes. They start off robbing a bank,
for crying out loud, and not because they've been wronged and not
because they want to give it to the poor. They do it because they
want to be rich. In any other book, these would be the bad guys,
but you'll be rooting for them before they even get out of the bank,
I guarantee it. Fraction makes these characters sympathetic without
any more than a glimpse of their pasts and their motivations.
Okay… he does have one of the bad guys (the Vegas mob guys
that is, not the bank robbers – we're supposed to be rooting
for them, remember) use the phrase, "Say your prayers"
at one point. Pretty cheeseball, I know, but by that time I was
chugging along so fast I barely noticed.
Backing Fraction up on art duties is Kieron Dwyer. Now, I've seen
a lot of Dwyer's work – everything from his early Captain America
to his indy Blackheart Billy stuff – but I don't think I've
ever liked it as much as I do here. The attitude of the book fits
Dwyer's sensibilities, and he doesn't waste a lot of time getting
fancy with panel layouts and money shots. In fact, Dwyer's art melds
with this story so well that you occasionally forget that it's there
at all. Sometimes, calling an artist a good storyteller rather than
a flashy one is kind of like telling the ugly girl that you think
she's very, very nice, but in this case it's totally complimentary.
Dwyer's art is pretty, but he never forgets that he's supposed to
be telling a story rather than showing off.
The book is published sideways, meaning what would normally be
the upper edge is now the spine. Marvel experimented a little with
this format, and DC published a Batman graphic novel this way, but
AiT/PlanetLar goes the big two one better by wrapping the book in
a paper slipcover. This means it can be stood up on a bookshelf
or a comic rack, eliminating my one major complaint with the format.
Dwyer makes good use of it too, spreading his art out across the
long pages. It can't be easy to turn your storytelling sensibilities
ninety degrees, but Dwyer handles it and makes it look easy.
There's a 95% chance that I'm going to like anything I pick
up from AiT/PlanetLar, but this book is probably my favorite from
their library so far. That's how good it is. It took my expectations
and punched them in the nose, ran them through with a kitchen knife,
and gave them the ol' lead perforation. And it made me like it.
(Okay, maybe this book is second behind the also AiT-published
True Story Swear To God… but that's just because I'm a big
softie.)
