by Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso
Publisher: DC Vertigo/Titan Books (ISBN 1845762525)
Our monthly gangster-set meditation on fatalism. Drawn & Quarterly would have published a lovely duotone, art-paper, square-shaped, 72-page book wherein diverse sea creatures vie for survival in a rapidly shrinking seaside rockpool on an unexpectedly sunny Spring day. But this is post-Moore, post-Gaiman Vertigo, so it's violent, convoluted, sexy, squalid, and fashionably slightly wrong, much like finding nipple rings in oysters.
And 100 issues long.
But then you need the length because this is a disaster movie in disguise. You need the space for the wide array of characters; for little incidents to snowball, connect, and reveal the growing calamity. And like disaster movies, it isn't what happens in the end that's interesting, it's how you get there and who's left alive. However, because it's a disaster movie, it does become deja-vu familiar, and it has to be claustrophobic, the dramatic options are limited, and it has to pace itself right; the foreplay has to stop at just the right point.
Which Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso almost don't do. It's a shame, as Volume VIII was superb, but their innovations start to feel like cliches and the trick box seems to run out, and I'm not saying that the book needs giant lizards discussing Emmerdale with cyborg pandas over macaroons in a Lake District tea house, but reading it as singles I felt it had to shake things up a bit before it got into a rut. Which it managed to escape in the last two chapters. These are a gear change that solidifies personalities and gives us something bright and light-hearted, relatively speaking. Perhaps it's the Loveless effect; their new book bringing a fresh approach to their old one. The story needs to continue this promise of something new as Azzarello's now trapped in a stylistic pattern. The nugget stories around which the overall story happens are like tunnels and track laid in a railway, while the main characters are trains running over and through them, mirroring their undulation with their own more significant movement, pressing them out of shape and out of place with their weight. We need more train and less track now. The variety of locations and bit-part players has stopped achieving much, it's like a cornflakes box where most of the content is plastic free gifts: great to begin with, but after five boxes we quite fancy some breakfast. The morality play nuggets are of necessity full of cliches as they are too brief except to be sketched out in easily-recognised and understood strokes. This is adding to the seen-it-all beforeness of the series as a whole.
The characters are almost forming a queue for the exit under the gravity of their inescapable fates, like Norse heroes dealt a doom by their own flaws; their flaws caught in their faces. A wonderful thing about Risso's art is that it hides no character. Everyone looks exactly what they are. This little bit of obviousness makes the story sleeker and shows up a character's progression over time. Watch Dizzy's dress sense, body language, and expressions develop from the earliest issues alongside her personality and world view. The art works for the story. Risso's a hero. And his Lono? A cross between Bagpus and Pauline Fowler via the School of Cruel Bastardry. A mad gorilla wearing John Travolta's skin.
So, at this point in the narrative, the rockpool is well shrunk, with hitherto unrelated characters appearing in the backgrounds of each others' stories. Or perhaps they always did? Incidents which we thought were just colour 30 issues ago turn out to be key turning points, like the sweaty fumble in the stationery cupboard that ends up down the aisle. In the over-plot, some factions become clearer, some motives plainer, some alliances stronger, some emnities better established, some directions ah directer, twists twistier, and a couple more Houses seem to bite the dust. A suicide pact of a peace treaty looks on the point of collapse. The title is instructive. Strychnine Lives? Strike Nine Lives? Nine little people die in the cross-fire in this book, as the poisonous backwash of our main players slops around, dumb and dangerous as a chemical spill. It's certainly a theme in this volume as is a broad generational conflict, with older characters looking to leave legacies, and younger characters straining to supplant their elders who in turn pay prices for protecting them. How these conflicts play out forms a large part of the story, and not always subtly: look out for the recurrent testicle mutilation.
We knew there were games in the story, and now we start to see what they are and who's on which side, but the games that Azzarello's playing with us are maybe more obvious, too. Words and numbers, names and people, they have meaning upon meaning, and Graves the apparent agent provocateur might not be what we thought he was under what he seems. Everything is subtext, connection, and overlap, while the whole time wearing all of its plots on its sleeve.
Or to put it another way, the alcoholic security guard has fallen asleep, the architect has discovered shortcuts in the construction, a record-breaking cold front is moving in, two people who do know better are copping off in a deserted office, and a fire has started on the fiftieth floor. Any moment now, a nun will reach for her guitar.
And it isn't yet obvious which were the inciting events, whose fault they were, and who was trying to stop them. After all it wasn't a single surge of water that broke through the flood defences in New Orleans, it was a sea. We don't yet really know who is the levee, who is Katrina, and who are merely Waves.
I love this book, and I love that the start of this volume was a little crap so that I could have the joy of it getting back on form by the end.
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