Writer: / Penciller: Graham Chaffe / SC / Publisher: Fantagraphics
Review by: Paul Dunne
21st December 2024 (Released: 3rd April 2024)
The Pitch: Graham Chaffee's first graphic novel in seven years, Light It, Shoot It is a classic tale of noir below the spotlight. Fresh out of prison for an arson conviction, clueless 20-year-old Billy Bonney finds himself drifting through the seedy and unsavoury world of cut-rate moviemaking, even more out of place amongst his peers than he felt as a teen six years earlier when he got busted. Following his brother to the sets of grade B and exploitation 1970s Hollywood seems like a path of least resistance until he accidentally lands a job as a handler to a has-been actor. But the bright lights burn harsher and show more than he anticipated as he steps lucklessly into a gangster-driven plot to burn down a studio for the insurance money, and finds himself in over his head. Drunken, washed-up stars. Scrambling, past-their-own-prime producers. Teenage girls on the make, slick hustlers, and violent fixers. Drawn in bold brushstrokes, and hand-painted in subtle washes, Chaffee brings vintage LA to the page in a propulsive adventure.
Can you ever really conquer a compulsion? Does it ultimately eat you up? Or can you put it behind you? In his first comics work in over a decade, Graham Chaffe explores this question, then breaks off into fascinating tangents that illustrate how decisions made a long way back to buy freedom can make today a prison. Speaking of prison, that's where we first find Billy Bonney. Looking at him, you'd hardly think he's someone who belongs in any kind of institution, correctional or educational. He's a meek kid but his punky, denim appearance belies a bad habit. He likes to watch things burn. His last bout of pyrotechnics burned a factory - his home town's main source of income and employment - down to the ground.
This makes him a pariah, free from prison, but not free from the moral repercussions of his actions and most definitely persona non grata back home. In a way, his hometown has become stuck in a moment, or more accurately, he's trapped it in a moment. The high-school bully is still a bully, so Bonney sets fire to his car, lighting the way to a new road for him as he follows the advice of pretty much everyone and gets the fuck out of town.
Hollywood and its fringes are a place for people who aren't wanted anywhere else. A place where they can go to wanted by everyone, but Billy just wants to be left alone. He gets a job hiding in the background, working with his brother and his Uncle. The only problem is that his uncle and his brother both work in the movie business - his brother is a camera assistant and his Uncle is a washed-up, rambunctious drunk actor who once had a career. How much hiding can Billy do? Strangely, Billy should be at home here, amongst people whose better days are behind them.
Chaffe uses Billy as a conduit to introduce a parade of unsavoury people with wildly oscillating morals. There's his brother, Bobby, his brother (who is actually the most decent of any other characters). Larry, his Uncle, who despite his drinking habits and insatiable sexual appetite is also relatively decent. But it's a downward slide from there, most notably Saul Cohen, the exploitation studio head, modelled on Roger Corman, but a real dead-ringer for Ben Gazzara in 'The Killing of a Chinese Bookie'. Cohen's in hock to his investors - the mob, who want to burn down his studio and collect the insurance. But Cohen has a movie to finish and his ex-wife (and co-producer), Katie on his back, who as it turns out may be the real brains behind Cohen's operation and plans to rid the studio of its nefarious connections. Chaffee is interested in the domino of consequences that Billy's arrival in L.A. seems to set off. But at the same time, he wants to show you that Billy is almost inconsequential to what's happening, at least in a negative sense. All the bad shit that coming over the Hollywood Hills was coming anyway. And so instead, Billy’s haplessness becomes a catalyst for other people's redemption, their salvation and maybe even his own. This is my first encounter with Chaffe's work, which I understand extends to the Tattooing world as well as comics. He draws here in lovely brush strokes, creating a squirming, grimy world reminiscent of Guy Davis' art. He writes well, languorously taking you through the petty machinations of grubby people. They all have ambition, with the exception of Billy who just wants to live his life unmolested by those machinations. You don't have to be in prison to yearn to be free, after all. It's the ambitions that set people on the paths they end up on and Chaffee's characters have reached the limits of theirs', perhaps ending up at the places they're finally meant to be.
For some, that means being saved from shitty fates. For others... well, let's just say that the question that comes to mind is do we get what we deserve or do we deserve what we get? Chaffee has created a fascinating graphic novel, one that deserves the term and recreates a period of American culture that's growing hazier as time passes. This is a low man’s view of what he thinks a glamorous industry might be, an escape route that moves this low man (Billy) from one desperate place to another. A place where ambition is another word for desperation and desperation might just eat you up, as Billy’s compulsions sometimes take a bite out of him.
Light It, Shoot It is available now from your local comic book shop.
