We try to figure out what we love about crime comics.
15th January 2020
This week sees the release of Killer Groove, a 70's set crime and music story, published by Aftershock Comics and created by Ollie Masters and Eoin Marron. Both Masters and Marron have a rap sheet for crime books, Masters is guilty as charged for 'The Kitchen' (published by Vertigo) and Marron is paroled for his work on Boom's Sons of Anarchy spin-off comics. To say Killer Groove resonated with me would be an understatement. The story of a down-at-heel musician-turned bartender, whose music career takes an upturn after he becomes a murderer and feels the music bleed back into his fingers as the bodies bleed out on the floor, Groove hit all the right notes. For the record, I can’t sing or play. It’s more the down-at-heel aspect that got me. In Killer Groove, the characters reek of failure and the desperation that brings. Poverty drives them. Makes their skin itch. You can see it, sweating through their pores, soaking through their brains and into their misjudged actions. Poor choices and poverty. It's a recipe for murder. Reading it, I fell in hate with some of the characters. They weren't really shitty people when you met them, but by the end, how could they be anything but?
Reading Killer Groove also got my wheels turning. About how I love comics. About how I love comics like this in particular. And about why.
Crime has been a part of comics since comics were a part of us. From their beginnings, a by-product of bootlegging to the sometimes shady deals made to keep a book in the right (read: wrong) hands, crime and comics needed each other. And it didn't stop there. The seediness of their origins seeped into the stories. I'm not talking about super-villainy. I'm talking about the day-to-day. Packing a gun when you pack your suitcase. Looking over your shoulder, either for the gun at your back or the chance to pick a pocket. Some of you out there are surprised to know that Detective Comics were just that, comics about detectives before Martha Wayne lost her pearls. The mad scientist aspect, the evil genius... that was for the sci-fi mags. Street-level crime was the order of the day. Most often, they focused on the noble Detective. Private and public. Later the focus shifted. It was the dark side that tempted us. We wanted to spend time in filthy places, with bad people. Most of this seemed to happen in cinema during the '60s and '70s. Our 'heroes' were anything but. The cops even had pirate names, like 'Popeye' Doyle. No wonder the thieves and jokers played better in our books than the white hats with their badges.
This puts us in an interesting place today. Look at how many crime comics take place back then, years ago. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' masterwork of desperation, Criminal (published by Image), wonders from decade to decade, never quite finding its home in the here and now. Parker, the late Darwyn Cooke's genius adaptations of Richard Stark's novels, from IDW is set around the 60s, actively pushing against the pop-stylings abundant in so much of modern crime fiction that hitches its wagon to that decade. Sure, there are short strokes here and there, the clothes, the cars. And those books sure have panache. But they're about bad people doing bad things. None of it's glitzy. None of plays out to Nancy Sinatra on the soundtrack. Like I said, Groove is a 70's story, taking a cruise past counter-culture movements like the Weathermen. It has that Watergate mood. What makes modern crime stories a barren land for most creators? Maybe it's the fact that most of our criminals are now in office, pulling the greatest heists ever seen, like Brexit and the Trump administration. Armed robbery just doesn't cut it anymore. We'd rather have a crime we consent to. We'll even vote for it, chief. Or maybe it's just those goddamned mobile phones that suck the suspense out of everything? If you can call the cops anytime, where's the danger? In the age of disclosure and `cold-case murder podcasts, can we ever really be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Can we see something we weren't supposed to? Get accused of a crime we didn't commit?
That's not to say contemporary crime books don't work. The Hard Place by Doug Wagner, Nic Rummel and Charlie Kirchoff stands out in recent memory. And no best-of list of recent years should get sent to print without checking and Jason Aaron and Jason Latour's Southern Bastards are on it. But maybe... just maybe, crime looks better wearing a frayed tan leather jacket, side-burns and carrying a Saturday night special. The lack of contemporisation in comics crime fiction gives way to another aspect. The lack of moral superiority. Reading these stories means placing yourselves contextually into the minds of the characters and more importantly, the times they're set in. It doesn't mean we can delight in the casual racism and sexism of the characters (and often those are the markers), but we can hopefully be present in that moment and understand it really was a different time. Placing today's morals on yesterday's men is, in my opinion, a fool's errand. You have to see it, to feel what the time was like. Observation isn't consent or approval. We don't side with our characters on these things any more than we might side with them on the violence they commit. We should be emotionally hurt by their behaviours then as we are now. But it might have to be there, or where is the emotional reality of the read?
That brings up another point of complicity in crime comics: Don't we, deep down, want our criminals to get away with it? What's the con if they don't taste success? A robber getting shot in the getaway isn't a criminal. He's a failed criminal. And ultimately, there's no pleasure in seeing criminals fail. At least not 'till we've briefly shared the thrill of success with them. In fact, one of the joys of Cooke's Parker stories is seeing just how damn capable the man is. He's like Batman in a suit and tie, every move made three steps ahead. Every act was thought through. Don't believe me? Take a look at the scene in 'The Hunter' where Parker finds his ex-wife dead and simply, callously sits down next to her body and watches television, before taking her body and destroying her face. His reasoning is that if she's found dead, her face recognised, the people that once believed him a corpse would know he's back. It's nasty and it's right.
Capability isn't something that troubles the characters of Killer Groove. If fact, it's their ineffectual lack of talent that drives them into the dark corners they find themselves in. You might find yourself thinking these guys were never killers. They just lucked into it, like stepping in shit and coming out smelling of roses. But the fact is, deep down, the killer inside has to be let out. The pleasure of the book is watching the slide. Seeing just how far they'll to keep themselves solvent. As I stated at the top, poverty will always be the Number 1 factor in crime. As someone who has been down on the end of the hook, with no money and no fixed abode, the temptation was there. In my time, I've been offered 'work' that was tax-free take home, easy money... what kept me on the side of my better angels was that I had an understanding of the potential ramifications of the actions I was being asked to take. I've witnessed crime and violence first-hand.
Violence and thievery are also mercurial concepts, though: unpleasant if directed against individuals, but do we feel the same way when they’re directed against corporations and governments? Is a purse-snatcher any more or less wrong than the shoplifter when we take a look at the motivations? Part of what makes something like, say, the Parker comics so good is the corporatisation of crime. The mob in The Hunted (the first Parker book) aren't called the mob or the mafia. And no one describes them as such. They're The Organisation. Or The Syndicate. They have a board of directors. And they really care about the value of their shares. We end up rooting for Parker not just because of his capability, but because he's independent. He's the little guy, taking on the corporation. That might be why I like this genre in comics so much. They appeal to my sense of scrappy hucksterism.
But there's something else at play in crime books. It's present in Criminal in a big way (as it is in most of the Brubaker / Phillips oeuvre). It's there to a lesser extent in Parker. And it's there in unusual ways in Groove. Romanticism. In Criminal, doomed love and deadly women drive the stories like an engine. Men fall for the wrong women all the time. Usually, it kills them, directly or indirectly. In Parker, the only one really doomed is Parker's wife. Parker himself is far too savvy to allow romantic distractions to come between him and his true love: Crime. But in Killer Groove, the doomed romance takes a different form. The characters are in love with the idea of themselves. Of who they once were and who they wanted to be. It's not even ambition as such. It's more the romantic idealism of who they could have been, like Brando in the back of that car in On The Waterfront, they could have been contenders. They could have had class.
In the end, what keeps most crime books going is the pervading sense that it's all going to go wrong. The fabled ‘one last job’ is usually one last job because someone will shoot you, or sell you out. Someone wants your money or your girl, whom you could never really trust anyway. In the end, It's not just the criminals who are doomed, but us. We put these comics down, emotionally crestfallen, hollowed out by what we've seen and experienced, but joyful for that experience nonetheless. No happy endings might be the mantra for this genre. But take a look at Criminal, with its noir-influenced, painterly art and hard-cased writing. Delve into Parker, with the hard lines and harder criminals, it's lead who likes nothing more than to use his favourite weapons – his hands – to put you back in your place. And open up the tragic songbook that is Killer Groove, play that album with all its fatalism right 'till the end. I don't always like where we're going in crime comics... but I love the journey there.
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