On this week’s edition of The Goggler Pull List, we review and recommend two phenomenal graphic novels from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips: Pulp and Bad Weekend.
Check it out.
Pulp (Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips)
There is something about telling a simple story well. In comics, there is a tendency to do the fantastical. To lean on all the freedoms that a pen and paper affords both the writer and the artist. In comic books, alien worlds and flying men, ghosts, and ghouls, and demons, don’t cost extra. The distances your story can go truly depends on the writer’s imagination and the artist’s ability translate that onto a page.
But when you have a writer like multiple Eisner Award winner Ed Brubaker, you don’t need the fantastical. And when you have an artist like Sean Phillips, everything is going to be beautiful.
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Pulp is just that. Set in 1939 New York, Pulp tells the story of Max, an aged freelance comic book writer trying to make ends meet in a post Great Depression world. In a New York City that looks down on its seniors as it looks to build to the future, a future that includes a second world war just around the corner.
Brubaker weaves the tapestry of the world and builds its layers without ever getting distracted by pulling on any one of those threads. The story here isn’t the gruff New York City of 1939. It isn’t the dilapidated housing projects, or the slow rise of Nazi sympathisers in America. It isn’t the romance of the old “Wild West” of America, of its frontier towns, and bandits, and Pinkertons.
In Brubaker’s hands it is none of it and all of it. There is a simple story here, set in motion as Max is mugged and beaten up on the streets of New York City while trying to do the right thing. There is a simple story here of an aged man, ignoring his age, and trying to relive his younger days, and do right by everyone around him. In lesser hands, Max’s story would have spanned decades of story, with multiple arcs that go out of their way to tell you who Max is, and why he left Mexico, or how he ended up in New York City. But none of that is really important to the story that Brubaker is trying to tell here. All you need to know is that Max used to be someone, now he isn’t, and he’s trying to get by.
Brubaker teases you with just enough history that you see Max as fully formed. He’s every aged Clint Eastwood character. You know this man, we don’t need the details.
Sean Phillips’ art is beautiful. From the cold New York to the warm American south, the panels jump out at you without screaming bold bright colours. They are atmospheric in some, and imposing and claustrophobic in others. Panels are rendered with a dreamlike warmth while still slapping you with the cold hard concrete of reality. Even if you’ve never read any of Brubaker’s other collaborations with Phillips, Pulp is a testament to the relationship these two have.
Told as one 70-something page story, Pulp was a story I wanted more of, but was nevertheless glad that it was something contained. The world is wide and expansive, the history deep and heavy, but Max’s story is all there, and it is a joy to experience.
Bad Weekend (Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips)
A hard-boiled mystery that takes place during a comic convention that involves stolen art, murder, and an age-old industry feud, this is a book that works on two distinct levels. On the face of it, this is an incredibly compelling piece of crime fiction, some of the best that the genre has on offer, with shades of Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake. A deeper reading of the book, however, especially for those with some knowledge of the inner workings of the comic book world, reveals a far more layered piece of meta-fiction that seamlessly blends reality, with history, myth, and gossip.
Hal Crane is one of those creators of legend. A brilliant artist who is “a collection of bad habits and worse moods.” Hal is about to be given a lifetime achievement award at San Diego Comic Con and Jacob, his one time assistant, has been tasked with babysitting him for the long weekend. Jacob’s job includes keeping the malcontent genius out of trouble and making sure actually he shows up to his own awards ceremony.
Hal’s got problems. He drinks too much. He’s alienated his family. He treats almost everyone around him like garbage. He is so self-destructive that he even ends up damaging his own legacy. And all for a quick buck.
At the core of this story are two of life’s tenets. The first is that old adage, “never meet your heroes,” and the second is the now infamous quote that may or may not have been said by Jack Kirby: “comics will break your heart.” Brubaker takes these platitudes and uses them to build a story that is as beautiful as it is tragic.
Like all of Brubaker and Phillips’ Criminal comic books, this too is a story about the dark and desperate sides of our personalities that we try to keep hidden from the world. It’s about the resentment and spite that we hold within ourselves and how that eventually festers into something inescapably toxic. The genius in the writing, however, is in the way Brubaker still manages to humanize his characters. It’s all too easy to frame these individuals as simply “bad guys.” But there is nuance here. There is an awareness that selfishness and shame, fear and spite, bitterness and rage, are all a part of what makes us complex, captivating, and human.
In Bad Weekend, it is character that creates stakes, and both Hal and Jacob – with their flaws and insecurities, and their tragically misplaced sense of who they are – are the perfect fodder for all of the criminality that takes place.
I think the thing I love most about Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Criminal stories is the quiet rage that inhabits their characters. They aren’t good or evil, they’re people, no different from you and me, making bad decisions, plagued by bad luck, and struggling with bad fate. They are skewed reflections of ourselves. Which is what makes these stories so relatable and so damn frightening.
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