Writers: Ollie Masters & Rob Williams / Penciller: Laurence Campbell / Colour Artist: Lee Loughridge / Letterer: Sal Cipriano. AWA (Artists & Writers Artisans, Inc.)
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10th June 2020
The Pitch: Three Made Men, standing at the brink of retirement, find their unbreakable bond put to the ultimate test when they are suddenly assaulted by the ghosts of their past.
I wonder if criminals, especially the prolific and violent ones at the top of their organisations, ever feel haunted by their crimes? Surely for rehabilitation to work, there must be an acknowledgement of guilt and remorse? Old Haunts doesn't want the criminals in its story to wait for rehabilitation. It's going to haunt them now. And boy, do they get haunted. At first, it's tough to tell, thanks to Williams and Masters' skilful craft and Campbell's smouldering art, if what we're reading is happening inside the minds of the mafiosos. Don't haunt anyone who isn't already haunted goes the old saying. But are these guys really seeing the past nipping at their heels? Is it real? All questions our protagonists may find themselves asking.
Like Michael mann, the team fuses existential concerns with criminal action
There's a sense throughout this book of creeping dread, something that usually belongs in horror, yet the comic has the look and feel of a crime story. This is a genre that Masters knows very well, having explored the grit and grime of The Kitchen a few years back and most recently, the excellent Killer Groove. Williams knows this world too, having written some of DC's top-notch scumbags in Suicide Squad and bridged the worlds of horror and crime in his recent Judge Dredd hits with Chris Weston. Their influences are worn firmly on their sleeves when we see the name of the restaurant our criminals like to relax in – it's called Mann's in what is doubtless a nod to Michael Mann, the director of Heat and Thief. Mann is a director who, like the team has done here, manages to fuse existential concerns with criminal action. In the early scenes, Campbell and Loughridge even replicate the look of Mann's Los Angeles, the lights of the city glowing like the iridescent algae that DeNiro's character dreams of seeing one day. From there you can read into the longed-for closure on ‘the life’. The getaway, the sunset, the twilight years.
There's always a danger you won’t live to see retirement in fiction
There's always a danger you might not live to see your retirement in fiction. That creeping fear runs through this issue, given form towards the end in an unexpected way (at least, I was expecting it). You come to realise that the book is really about what lies beneath: Beneath the machismo of the criminals, beneath their decisions to move away from the lives they've built on the corpses of others. It's why big crime and big business are so closely aligned today. They're all just corporate machines, operating with soul or conscience. This is what happens when there's a ghost in the machine and it wants to show you the rhyming couplets between the life you ended for it and the life you expect to start now. Old Haunts might just be poetry, written in blood.
Buy AWA Comics here and support The Comic Crush. By now, you can buy the trade of Old Haunts from Gosh Comics or order it from Bookshop.org