We pop our collective heads up and everywhere we look the world is in turmoil. 2020 is a unanimous write-off, and so it went with 1939 and the lead up to Fascism and World War II, and so it went with The Depression and psychic scars left in a population that survived that uncertainty and grinding poverty, and so it went going back to the 1890s, where it was considered a feat of divine luck just to survive a visit to a frontier surgeon.
Life. Is. Hard.
And, overall, it has always sucked.
Despite this, one constant source of pleasure for me is seeing
smart people executing a job well. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips working
together as a team have this down in spades. For years now, ever since
“Criminal” and on through “Fatale” and all their other collaborations, they’ve
returned and nibbled away at the same feast, savored and digested and presented
back in different ways for the comics reader.
The pulps. Stories written to order, selling genre and
pumped out at speed. These tales, whether lurid monster stories, noir mysteries
or Western tales of adventure, were intended to be disposable, and the
freelance writers who produced them, paid pennies for the word, were often
treated the same way. Yet, if you were fast and lucky, you could make a living
as a writer. And readers, if we were lucky, would find not just a good yarn, a
trashy tale that knew what it was and played well within the rules, but
something that smirked at those conventions, nodded to them, and somehow rose
above.
“Pulp” does the same. One wonders under what conditions it
was created, but it feels both timeless and a product of our time. It’s maybe
lighter fare than their duo’s earlier original graphic novel “My Heroes Have
Always Been Junkies,” but it’s a bracing read that lingers well after the last
page has turned. Brubaker has the language and beats down to a science and
Phillips’ art jumps off the page, from the frontier flashbacks to the
congestion of a 1930s New York.
Life is hard.
Max, the protagonist of “Pulp,” is expertly drawn. Fedora
always in place, he has the gaunt mustachioed face of an elder Dashiell
Hammett. True to one of the genre’s tropes, his narration come to us out of a
voice, he pulls together his story from pieces. There are “a lot of beginning,”
he admits. “But that’s what life is…right?”
Life is hard and for every opportunity, every success and
every failure, there comes a new beginning, and we keep living, just like all
keep reading what this pair puts out, until it ends.
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