Who hasn’t had a day like this: you go visit a wealthy couple only to find them brutally murdered by international assassins at the behest of the billionaire elite - and it’s raining and you don’t have a brolly! Well, time to hit the old dusty trail with a couple other targets and a buncha people with guns chasing you and hope you don’t get too wet!
A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance is Rick Remender’s latest series and it’s actually pretty decent. I’d even go so far as to say it’s his best comic in years, though that’s only because he’s put out a lotta crap in the last eight or so years!
There’s no omniscient narrator or an internal dialogue with any characters so the nameless protagonist is a mystery throughout. Who is he? What’s he doing at the house to begin with - what’s his relationship with those people? How does he have access to dark web assassin pages? Why is he getting involved when he’s clearly not an assassin himself?
We never find out, at least not in this first volume, which is my biggest critique with the book: there are too many questions and zero answers which makes for an unsatisfying narrative. But, I’m also interested in finding out the answers, so Remender at least provides a tantalising setup.
You do get glimpses of the larger storyline, though what little I saw in this book wasn’t that impressive. It seems like it’s about Jeffrey Epstein-types doing despicable human sex-trafficking shit on tropical islands for the monied elite with the big bad as a Trump proxy. It’s contemporary but not that imaginative.
I really enjoyed the laid-back, slow burn of that first issue, which read like a slice-of-life comic before segueing violently into a gory actioner. That brilliant unpredictability continues for the rest of the book so you’re always guessing as to what’s going to happen to our nameless protagonist next and what the point of it all is.
The action does dominate the book from the halfway point on, which bothered me because I wanted more information on who the characters were and why things were happening, but the action is done superbly so it’s engaging, if a bit shallow. And that’s in big part due to the magnificent artist of this series, Andre Lima Araujo, whose art is absolutely beautiful.
I’ve never been to Vancouver (one day…) but it looks great here, particularly Chinatown, and the sequencing throughout is executed so perfectly that you understand exactly what’s happening in a scene - where the characters are in a room, how they move around, how they end up where they end up. This comic is a great example of the writer and artist as well-balanced storytellers, with both complementing each other’s work to best effect for the audience. Chris O’Halloran’s subtle but appealing colours also add a lot to the stunning visuals - this is one of the best-looking comics I’ve seen in a while.
It’s too slight on story substance for my taste, but the first volume of A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance (the title also doesn’t make sense at this point either) did enough to hook me and ensure I’ll be back for the second arc. The art is the real star here but it’s also a solid action thriller that’ll entertain most fans of that genre - a decent start to a compelling new title.
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