“We weren’t heroes. We were killers. That’s the reason we survived so long… Because this world belongs to monsters.
It shouldn’t.”
It’s the winter of 1939 in New York City and the aptly-named Max Winter (not just because of the season the story takes place in but because Max is in the “winter” of his life), a struggling Western pulp fiction writer, gets some bad news. But he decides to make sure he goes out well - leaving his wife Rosa with enough to comfortably get by in her retirement and take out some Nazis too. Stick ‘em up!
Unsurprisingly Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have produced another cracking comic with their latest, Pulp. I was effortlessly drawn into Max’s story and I loved the bait’n’switches Brubaker threw in - just when you think, aha, I know where this is going, nope! And then again - and then again! It’s great - I love it when a writer can do that with his audience so well.
The only thing I would say that stops me from giving this book the highest score is that, having read dozens of Brubaker’s comics now, I saw a lot I’d seen before from him. Max is another down-on-his-luck anti-hero with nothing to lose and a gun in his hand, and certain scenes are very reminiscent of titles like Criminal and Kill or Be Killed. Pulp lacks that element of novelty that I crave even though I realise a lot of this book is about genre and novelty is all but absent from those kinds of books.
That and Jacob Phillips’ colours still aren’t doing it for me. Honestly, the flashback scenes to Max’s youth looked like he took a crayon flat on its side and rubbed it against the paper - just awful. If it wasn’t for his dad Sean I wonder if he’d get any high-profile colouring gigs.
Otherwise, I really enjoyed the story. Despite being a dickhead I liked Max’s editor Mort and the dialogue is as wonderfully gritty as you’d expect - the quote at the top of the review is indicative of the kind of bittersweet lines the book is filled with. Nazis as villains is a well-worn cliche at this point but I didn’t mind as the overall message of the book is a fine one to leave readers with, as well as being a stark contrast to the darkness of the story.
Nitpicks aside, Pulp is a great comic by two masters of the medium - fans of Brubaker and Phillips will love it.
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