Murder Book Volumes 1 and 2

Murder Book Volume 1

Volume 1 "Catching Up" and "Skimming the Till"

Written and lettered by: Ed Brisson
Illustrated by: Simon Roy

Murder Book Volume 2

Volume 2 "Trickle" and "Settling Up"
Written and lettered by: Ed Brisson
Illustrated by: Vic Malhotra (Trickle) and Michael Walsh (Settling Up)

Murder Book provides an excellent foray into what can be most easily classed as the Crime / Noire genre of comics currently enjoying some elevated interest.  Most notably reminiscent of Ed Brubaker's Criminal and Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of Parker, these first two volumes each present two well-crafted, self-contained, and competently illustrated stories.

Volume 1 gives us the twin gifts of Catching Up and Skimming the Till, both illustrated by Simon Roy.

Catching Up: A chance encounter between two old friends takes a deadly turn when one man will do anything to protect his secret.

Skimming The Till: Two meth-heads attempt to rob a cafe and get more than they bargained for as their potential victim turns the tables on them.

Roy's illustrations are dark with heavy lines and deep shadows throughout and do an excellent job of invoking the necessary mood required.  The dialogue is smoothly plotted from panel-to-panel and when needed Roy's characters spring into action with brute force.  Roy's style is similar in many ways to what you can find in many black and white "Indy" comics but he demonstrates such a strong sympathy for the characters' emotions through their varied facial expressions and body language that you can't help but be drawn into the story and feel the tension mounting as Brisson's plot comes to it's surprise / twist climax common in noire fiction.

Murder Book Volume 1: Skimming the Till - Page 4 - Illustrated by Simon Roy, Lettering by Ed Brisson

Volume 2 gives us the opportunity to see two different artists' interpretation of Brisson's scripts with Vic Malhotra taking up the duties for Trickle and Michael Walsh taking his turn at Settling Up.

Trickle: A drug dealer faces allegations of stealing from his organization. Despite his claims of innocence, his bosses demand retribution.

Settling Up: An ex-cop comes face-to-face with the man who ended his career and ruined his life. However, the moment doesn't necessarily pan out the way he planned.

Both stories are written by Brisson with similar pacing as in Volume 1 and he continues to deliver original unexpected twist endings to both entries in this volume.  His dialogue remains tight and economical and even when characters are given the opportunity for a little longer exchange as they do in Settling Up, they are still concise and "real" as opposed to the completely unrealistic and over-long Tarantino-esque monologues many writers try to emulate.

The artwork varies significantly from Volume 1 and between the two stories in Volume 2 with Walsh's work on Settling Up being the looser and lighter of the two (all the while conveying as much movement and emotion as Roy's work in Volume 1) in contrast to Malhotra's lines in Trickle that are very angular and unfortunately have difficulty conveying the action and emotion in what is probably Brisson's best of the four stories presented in these two volumes.

Murder Book Volume 2: Trickle Page 1 - Illustrated by Vic Malhotra, Lettered by Ed Brisson

Murder Book Volume 2: Settling Up Page 2 - Illustrated by Michael Walsh, Lettered by Ed Brisson

Overall I enjoyed both volumes and look forward to future volumes of Murder Book should Brisson's schedule permit.  The series presents engaging noire vignettes that while lacking the complexity of Parker or Criminal still act as excellent introduction to the genre for new mature readers.

DMZ Vol. 1 "On The Ground" TPB

DMZ Vol. 1 "On The Ground" TPB (Contains DMZ issues #1 to 5)

 

Brian Wood - Writer
Riccardo Burchielli and Brian Wood - Artists
Jeromy Cox - Colourist
Jared K. Fletcher - Letterer
Published by DC/Vertigo

Simply put, entering DMZ is the closest you're going to get to entering a war zone without flying to Iraq or Afghanistan.  Wood and Burchielli's creation serves as both an amazingly entertaining and engrossing read as well as critique of sanitized and propagandized war time media coverage.

DMZ literally drops us into an alternate present world where the United States has just completed the fifth year of a civil war.  New Jersey and the inland states have declared themsleves "The Free States"; Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island are still part of the original USA, while Manhattan Island is designated as the DMZ (demilitarized zone - see map below).

Page 1 Panel 1 - The DMZ

We ostensibly follow Matthew "Matty" Roth, a "Photo Tech Intern" forced into the impromptu role of rookie photo-journalist when the star photo-journalist and crew he was supposed to be assisting are immediately gunned down upon landing in the DMZ.

As Matty quickly learns, the manufactured reality he was being fed by the media about life in the DMZ is as far from the truth as the sun is from a lightbulb. The fact is that there are real people in the DMZ trying to do the same thing that people everywhere are trying to do...survive.  The comparison to what the reality of warzones like Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, etc. are actually like vs the North American media depictions of those places is fairly obvious.

The strength in Wood and Burchielli's creation is in the characters, not the least of which is the city itself.  Wood and Burchielli's characterizations, pacing, dialogue, and artwork are spot on throughout; from the initial helicopter takedown, Matty's meeting with Zee and her medical rounds, to meeting the 'Ghosts' of Central Park, the story never lags and always leaves you itching to turn the page and see what comes next.

As Cory Doctorow writes in his introduction to Volume 3 of the series, "DMZ is a special kind of angry comic, the kind of angry war comic that tells the side of the other side of the war...It's a wake-up call to stop letting greedy profiteers sell fresh wars to cement their authority and profitability."

Other works by Brian Wood worth checking out:

Channel Zero

DEMO with Becky Cloonan