Pulp Friction #2 – Review

By: Mark Waid (story), Loston Wallace (pencils), Bob Wiacek (inks), Hi-Fi (colors)

The Story: The Spirit on a plane.

The Review: Four months—that’s the amount of time it took to get from the first issue of this (four-issue!) mini to the second.  And that’s only after a month or so seeing the issue solicited for release week after week until my local comic book shop gave up and redacted the title from their weekly newsletter entirely.  I don’t know if this is the consequence of a dual-publisher team-up or what, but it better not be a running pattern.

The problem with shipping delays is, even though they have nothing to do with the story itself, they still affect the story’s impact.  Ordinarily, each issue only has to have enough substance to carry a reader through the next month.  When you have an issue that must now carry four months’ worth of entertainment on its back (and possibly four more—God forbid), you’re only setting it up for failure.  It gets even worse when, as here, the issue isn’t outstanding anyway.

Pulp Friction #1 – Review

By: Mark Waid (story), Paul Smith (art), Jordie Bellaire (colors)

The Story: East Coast mystery man meets West Coast daredevil.

The Review: What is it about pulp, specifically one era of pulp, that keeps readers coming back for more even decades past its prime?  If you ask me, pulp offers baggage-free entertainment: all the action and dramatic flair, without the challenging gray areas.  In a world where each piece of fiction is a different cocktail of increasingly wild combinations, pulp is the whiskey shot of genres: straight, to the point, and just what you needed.

Certainly, there has been no better age for the everyman character.  So many of our heroes nowadays have to be “special” in some way: a mutant, a prodigious intellect, a person touched by the hand of fate—someone who is different from everybody else.  The Spirit and Rocketeer are comparatively ordinary beneath their domino mask and space helmet.  Denny Colt and Cliff Secord aren’t brawny Adonis’ or super-geniuses or gifted with unusual abilities and powers of any kind.  They get by on their guts, a good dose of cleverness, and their values.

The Spirit #13 – Review

By: David Hine (writer), Moritat (artist), Gabe Bautista (colorist)

The Story: Do I choose the super-hot puppet, or the super-hot real lady?  Decisions, decisions…

The Review: When it comes to fiction, you can’t (or you shouldn’t) really expect incredible realism, but you do expect whatever it is you’re reading or watching to mimic reality as best it can.  But when it comes to genre fiction, you’re much more willing to let certain things slide.  For romance, it’s the ludicrously chosen lovemaking moments; for sci-fi, it’s all the pseudo-science babble; and for pulp, it’s the private eye’s rambling, uber-macho monologues.

The opening pages have the Spirit staking his claim on Central City against all the mobster vermin that threaten to take it over.  His speech, in almost any other circumstance, would be incredibly corny, but in this title, with Hine’s expert handle on pulp narration, you just get pumped up to hear the Spirit say, “They’re all wrong.  Dead wrong.  This is my city.”  The smash cut to our hero giving the beatdown to thugs across the red light district is icing on the cake.

Hine also brings his characteristic twist of drama into the proceedings.  The Professor’s puppet fetish is of course driven by personal tragedy from his past, although Hine smartly leaves events open-ended: was Esmerelda (the model for the Professor’s first lady-bot) really his first sweetheart, or just love from afar?  Did she betray him, or was he just paranoid of her doing so?  And was her subsequent death truly “an accident,” as the Professor states?

These are some juicy questions, but Hine never answers them—at least, not directly.  He sprinkles the issue with subtle clues you can weave together for your own conclusion: how the eyes in Esmerelda-bot’s disconnected head follow the Professor around the room; how he covers her unblinking face while trying to seduce Ellen Dolan; and the haunting final embrace between him and the restored automaton (“I love you…I’ll always love you” never chilled you more).

The Spirit #12 – Review

By: David Hine (writer), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist)

The Story: You ever get a feeling from dolls that their eyes keep following you around the room?  Well, you should be worried—because actually they might kill you.

The Review: With any genre of art, you’ve got a few ways of going about it: stick to conventions for a traditional, if formulaic, work; stretch the boundaries and give a new spin to the genre’s spirit; or bring in elements from other genres for a mash-up category all its own.  An ongoing comic has the luxury of using all three routes as it sees fit for the story it wants to tell.

For the first leg of his run on The Spirit, Hine gave pretty standard fare as far as pulp stories go: mobsters and their dicey business, femme fatales, private eye cases.  But lately he’s grown more confident in offering more dramatically challenging material, and now he’s even bringing a bit of retro (even uber-retro, since puppeteers and their servant golems are old news for fiction) sci-fi stuff to the table.

By itself though, the robot mannequin concept would seem gimmicky and out of place in a title so obviously rooted in straight-up detective work.  But Hine smartly doesn’t give too much focus to the puppets themselves (although the Spirit doll is all kinds of creepy fun), but rather to their creator, mad-scientist assassin, the Professor.  What started out as a rival mafia premise is slowly becoming more of a character piece, the kind of thing Hine’s proven himself very good at.

The little layers Hine gives to the Professor this issue elevate the old man from creepazoid to a sympathetic figure.  Even though we know nothing of his history, the way Hine writes his behavior and reactions, especially to Ellen Dolan, says a lot about what a life starved of love he’s had—it certainly explains the robot-dame he has as his escort, and why her physical affections towards him in the end result in her beheading.