Forget everything you think you know about noir. Forget the P.I., the dame, the crime boss, the gritty city they’re all stuck in… except don’t. Limbo takes all those tropes and throws them in a blender with some neon lights and 80s music. The result is one hell of a comic that everyone should be […]
We may think of pulps or pulp fiction as gritty crime noir in which cynical not-the-cops characters fight the basest kind of criminal committing the basest kind of crime. But “pulp” is actually a kind of paper, just as “tabloid” is actually a newspaper with a single, central fold. But the pulps took on the […]
Pulp noir fiction is a medium and genre that is dark and cynical in tone and involves crime. The person investigating is not an official like a police officer or detective, which would make it hardboiled fiction. The hero of the story is a victim, a suspect, a perpetrator, or a vigilante. The system itself […]
Scalped, a western/crime noir comic book by current Marvel architect Jason Aaron and artist R. M. Guera, is about as rough as it gets. The book starts with a bar fight, and the violence and testosterone doesn’t relent until toward the end, when the shape of what Aaron and Guera are really doing begins to […]
The thrilling conclusion to Josie Schuller’s clash with her life as a housewife and her secret life as an assassin. Though perhaps not a new concept, this old setting breathes new life into the idea of a woman leading a double life. The setting has such hope, with its cutting edge technology and the feel […]
In 1939, a 22-year-old Will Eisner was approached by Quality publisher Busy Arnold and a man named Henry Martin, who was the sales manager for the Register & Tribune Newspaper Syndicate. The men had a radical idea. Concerned about the growing competition they faced from comic books where young readers were concerned, the men proposed […]
About a year and a half ago, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips signed an unprecedented deal at Image Comics that sent a considerable wave through the industry. Exclusive deals are usually thought of as limiting deals where corporations seek to lock down a writer or artist as long as possible, roping them into a […]
In 2009, Darwyn Cooke released THE HUNTER, the first of a planned series of graphic-novel adaptations of Richard Stark’s acclaimed series of “Parker” crime novels. It won a whole mess of awards, made the New York Times bestseller list, and was widely considered one of the best books of the year. Cooke’s second Parker project, […]
Hit opens with moments before a dance of violence and bullets and spilled drinks, and ends with more gunfire on the horizon. This four-issue series, a comic book crime noir drenched in blood and bourbon, was originally serialized by Boom! Studios as Hit #1-4, published as an oversize Pen & Ink volume (think a single […]
Frank Miller’s heart has always been with “crime comics.” You could tell that from his breakthrough days at Marvel back in the’80s when he took over DAREDEVIL, a character that was and always had been essentially a second-string SPIDER-MAN knockoff, and in short order eliminated most of the superheroics (as well as the wisecracking Daredevil […]
