Most of the time, when a comic shop clerk recommends a book to me, I've got enough of a sense of decency to actually purchase that book from them, instead of doing something scummy like buying it off Amazon or the like. But a couple of weeks ago, I stopped by the Titan store in Woodstock to say hello to the manager, whom I dated some years ago, and - in front of my kids! - she tells me that she had thought about me when the shop received the first issue of a new Suicide Girls miniseries, and that I'd certainly enjoy all the nude pin-ups in the back drawn by Cameron Stewart.
So I probably should have bought it from that store, but, try as I might, I just don't know that it's right to go around buying smut from anybody you used to smooch. So I bought it from the shop where we always visit for Free Comic Book Day, since you can get more free stuff there if you spend some money, and couldn't decide what else I wanted to actually buy to get the desired amount of free swag.
We'll draw a polite veil on why the manager in question instantly thought of me upon seeing this comic, but we'll agree that I should probably buy something else from her to make up for being a bad customer. At least I have an ex who recommends me girlie mags; there's this one girl I once dated who has taken to pretending she's not white so she can "win" racial arguments on the internet.
Anyway, unfortunately, Cameron Stewart only inks the actual comic, which is penciled by David Hahn and scripted by Brea Grant. Stewart does contribute four pin-ups in the back, and the artwork is generally very good throughout. The story, however, really needs an electric charge to get moving. I know that it seems that critiquing the story of a Suicide Girls comic book is like kicking small, defenseless animals, but while this wasn't a very good comic by any measure, I've seen far, far worse from Marvel and DC lately. The plot suggests a world where, rather than being a fun soft-porn-led online community, the Suicide Girls are a very old, Illuminati-styled secret society of ass-kickers. The scenario's genuinely not far removed from Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Seriously. The execution is, surprisingly, not quite so good.
I'm willing to accept the very silly rules of the narrative for its own sake. This is a world where a murderer - one of the heroes of the story - tattoos the names of her victims on her body, which is something only a very, very stupid killer would do. But okay, they do that sort of thing in Suicide Girls-world. There's a big multi-national religio-techno-conspiracy based around privatizing the prison system and so it's okay to kill the executives behind it. As with The Invisibles, the morality of the protagonists is shifty and their actions are ethically questionable but it's given a pass because the baddies are allegedly bad enough to deserve it.
I don't have half the problem with the narrative as I do the slow, deliberate presentation. Twenty big-paneled pages breeze by and damn near nothing happens in them. Brea Grant, an actress just beginning her comic-writing career, is sadly taking lessons from modern American superhero comics. All that happens in these twenty pages is that a small group of Suicide Girls break their new recruit out of prison and they give each other a little backstory. Maybe two of the six ladies get a little memorable characterization, but for the most part, it's paced in a similarly glacial style as almost everything I've read by Brian Michael Bendis and his imitators, with long establishing shots and lengthy internal narration from the imprisoned recruit, when picking up the pace and using more panels per page could have seen so much more story in this issue. Nothing happens across any six pages that a better writer couldn't have managed in one.
This leads to very disappointing results from Hahn, whose figure work, as I recall from his old series Private Beach, is really excellent, but, forced to only draw four or five panels a page, he's got no choice but to emphasize too much negative space. This is a story that mostly takes place in a dark prison and in a dimly-lit underground base.
I'm willing to be a little kinder to Grant, and give her points for trying, than I was to Joe Casey and Frazer Irving, whose Iron Man book I mentioned here a few weeks ago, because those two have been in this business a while and really should know better. I've got no objection to this book's concept, and am not going to dismiss it out of hand just because it's fashionable among comic book snobs to mock the Suicide Girls for being naked or having a booth at San Diego or whatever, but while it's not very good, at least it's different and it's drawn very well. I can't recommend it, but I appreciate the effort. And that pin-up of Radeo in the back. My.
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