the end is near, hard-boiled style

The Last Days Of American Crime #1 (of 3)
Written by Rick Remender
Illustrated by Greg Tocchini
Lettered by Rus Wooten
Edited by Luis Reyes
Published by Radical
Covers by Alex Maleev and Tocchini

Remender's Last Days Of American Crime iss one is a whiskey-stained bit of hellfire and shell casings of an opener. The Federal Government is soon to zap the country with a psychotropic broadcast that will supposedly nullify criminal urges throughout the US of A. To help downplay the expectantly riotous response to such a plan, a cover-up scheme is set in place so as to coincide with the day wherein all paper money will be officially replaced with electronic funds. However, news of the hidden agenda hits the open and people everywhere cut loose with the sinning before free will becomes a thing of the past. Enter Graham Bricke, a roustabout career criminal with a mug only his senile ma could love. Bricke has enough old scars to know he could never swing a Fred Rogers kinda life, so he needs one more score- one more big score- to set himself up for good.

Honestly, I sat on this review for awhile, unsure how to go about this, to do it justice. Remender has shocked me with his very modern and politically-savvy crime noir story. This is easily his best work I have yet encountered, so the news of a movie deal already in the works makes a world of sense. His characters here are brutal, damaged goods one and all, from the brutish Bricke to the nympho Shelby to the bloody mess of a guy chained up in a bathtub in the opening scene. This world is harsh and bitter, and the people who inhabit it are survivors. Not meager stereotypes familiar to the genre, they are fully-developed personalities so on the money you may need a stiff drink or three after this series is through, if only to cleanse the taste from your mouth.

And Tocchini...by god if there is any justice in this world, in this medium, Greg had damn well better win an Eisner or Harvey or both for his labours come next year. I told a mutual friend that the art in Last Days is Travis Charest scary-good, and I mean it. There are nuances of John Buscema, Mark Texeira, Adam Hughes, and even Sean Phillips here- as diverse as those styles are, but Tocchini has elevated his own style in these pages, from his previous efforts elsewhere on high to something really special that is going to shock everybody who reads the book. Something about this gritty world of desperate people has pulled him in deep, and the passion is evident in every single panel of every single page. I absolutely love dynamic, inventive layouts and lush page designs, and his angular POV's and smart but flowy compositions, his full process art including the kind of knowing colours that can add dimensions to shadows we just don't see in most examples of Western comic book art...everything is just so perfect, so beautiful, so real. An ugly worldview infused with the grace of hopeless, broken dreamers. There is real intuition in the lines drawn by Tocchini.

And anyone who knows me knows well that I hate to gush, but this work is just tremendous, striking a serious chord with me. Obviously.

As hard and heavy handed as this tale is and will be, of course there are strong doses of sex and violence and language generally unfit for the rotary club types, so be forewarned. For fans of pulpy, suspense thrillers full of the brooding darkness you rarely see outside of the bars where fights break out every other night, this is your shot. Forget Sleeper. Forget the shameful work Remender is doing for the House Of Ideas right now. The Last Days Of American Crime may well have just upped the ante a bit for the whole damn medium. I kid you not.

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