Pistolwhip
January 11th, 2003by Matt Kindt and Jason Hall
ISBN: 1891830236
This is one clever book.
An oversized rectangle, the book itself is designed to look like an old-fashioned radio, and that is where much of the stories’ action takes place: on a radio show. Pages between story segments even include typed-up coffee-stained bits of script.
Kindt and Hall are going for a noir feel, and between the art and the story elements, they succeed. They’ve got great character names like Charlie Minks, the Human Pretzel, and Jack Peril; burly guys in sailor gear; a creepy old guy in a wheelchair; and of course, a detective, a girl with a gun, and the requisite level of desperation.
The artwork is beautiful. The story is layed out on nine-panel pages, but they play with that — some pages are one giant panel, other have the dark black of a man’s jacket spilling out of the frame. The drawing is angles and straight lines, a mix of small details and suggestion. The shifitng points of view add extra visual interest. The use of the man in the underwater suit is a prime example of this.
The first part of the book tells the main story; the following chapters take different character’s points of view. It is the kind of thing that you finish and immediately want to read again. This is great stuff.
A new graphic novel (Pistolwhip: the Yellow Menace) will be out any second. It is good to see more work from this team getting published because they are smart and different; it is also good to see that it is being released in novel-length format because the kind of story they want to tell wouldn’t work nearly as well chopped into little instalments. That said, I am curious to check out the shorter comic (Mephisto and the Empty Box) that was published at the same time as this; being self-contained and not serial I expect to like it.
Bottom line: if you don’t think of yourself as a comics person but you like old movies, give this a try. If you are a comics fan, and are looking for something a little different with a good solid story, pick this up.
