Area 10,by comic/TV/film/online animation writer Christos N. Gage and prolific comicartist Chris Samnee, is a shocking page-turner that pits New York PoliceDepartment Detective Adam Kamen against an amorphous legion of practitioners inthe crude, mystical science of trepanning. Whether you’ve heard of trepanningor not, be glad this book isn’t in color. In the realistic gross-outsweepstakes, Area 10 comes secondonly to Jason Aaron and R.M. Guéra’s Scalped.
What makes Area 10’s graphic violence doublydisturbing is its story’s grounding in reality. Gage’s Detective Kamen embodiescertain basic human qualities: We all question our own powers of perceptionfrom time to time, most of us want to protect the defenseless, and many of us wouldsacrifice our lives to save our loved ones. Kamen’s battle with the trepanners(and/or his own mind) interests us because we see glimpses of these qualitiesin him.
Gage’s artful scriptturns police and medical procedures into a kind of soul-searching. Samnee’sshifting perspectives from later, aerial, and ground-level views, long-distanceall the way down to face-to-face, put the reader inside the action. His heavyuse of black shadowno gray in this bookadds drama and portent to thecharacters’ expressions, and the story’s first few supernatural sequences areso brief and cleverly drawn that they make us question our own reading of thestory.
Peter Milligan’sstory The Bronx Kill shares Area 10’s dramatic structure. Milligan’sprotagonist Martin Keane is a writer tortured by his family’s past. Martin’slovely wife, Erin, encourages him to confront and conquer that past. To testMartin’s courage, Milligan bombards his and Erin’srelationship with obstacles of folkloric, mystical and even prosaic origins.Several pages of The Bronx Kill aremock manuscript of a novel in progress, wherein Martin appears to be trying torewrite his own life.
The familial, highlylocalized action set in the Bronx and Cork, Ireland, givesthe self-absorbed Martin a vivid, approachable personality. Artist JamesRomberger’s quickly rendered work is so sketch-like that it appears, likeMartin’s novel, to be an unfinished draft. At first the unstylized, undetailedart makes it difficult to discern between characters, but ultimately itcomplements those characters’ explosive behavior. The perspective is mainlyaerial, which might suggest a certain Catholic judgment of the characters. OrRomberger simply might be trying to evoke life in the Bronx,as seen from police helicopters, high-rise apartments and the occasional bird.
Area 10and The Bronx Kill differ from theirDC predecessors in their language, which reflects modern New York in all its candor and crudity. Allthe bluntness and bloodletting in these books actually reinforce an artisticappeal for tenderness and mercy. Both books demandand meritsecond readings.My only gripe with the books is over the lengthy dying-villain soliloquies usedin both. Yes, we want to know the villains’ motivations, but comic books needmore clichés like record collections need more dust.
Vertigo Crime’s fourother new titles are Dark Entries, anoccult detective story by writer Ian Rankin and artist Werther Dell’Edera; Filthy Rich, a greed-and-lust tale bywriter Brian Azzarello and artist Victor Santos; The Chill, a thriller by writer Jason Starr and artist MickBertilorenzi that, like The Bronx Kill,deals with Celtic mythology; and TheExecutor, a tale of being haunted by an old flame’s past by writer JonEvans and artist Andrea Mutti.
