Local Man, Volume 1: Heartland Review (Tim Seeley, Tony Fleecs)

SPOILERS

Crossjack was once part of the superhero team Third Gen - now he’s simply Jack Xaver, washed up has-been back in his small town of Farmington, unemployed, broke and middle-aged. Coincidentally, Third Gen’s old villains begin getting murdered once Jack’s back in town - but whodunit?

Tony Fleecs and Tim Seeley team up for this part-love letter to ‘90s Image superhero comics, part-murder mystery, that fulfils the former and doesn’t really deliver on the latter. The first volume of Local Man is instead a muddled, increasingly dreary comic that’s unclear on what it’s trying to say.

I only know the creators as writers so I was surprised that both could draw so well. Fleecs draws the Farmington/present day parts and Seeley draws the Third Gen/flashback parts and both look really good. Seeley in particular channels the art style of Jim Lee, The Rob, et al. - Third Gen could easily have been a real Image superhero series from the ‘90s.

That’s about it for the praise unfortunately. Superhero deconstruction stories aren’t new and Local Man doesn’t do anything different from what went before. I’ve only read Fleecs’ Stray Dogs but it was really well written, while I’ve read a number of Seeley comics and he’s never written anything even half decent so I’m wondering if the low quality of the writing and storytelling is down to Seeley’s influence.

It’s never really clear why Jack got kicked off of Third Gen. There’s something about him having an affair with Camo Crusader’s wife but we see in the flashbacks, or whatever those nostalgia comics backups were meant to be, that he slept with her with Camo Crusader’s consent, and it was years ago - so it’s just now become a problem why? Camo Crusader says some garbled stuff about kids in his confrontation with Jack but it’s a confusing mess.

And what Camo Crusader’s up to anyway is similarly baffling. I have no idea what all that secret stuff was and I’m not at all fussed in finding out in future volumes (assuming it gets picked up again).

The murder mystery element didn’t work because we know it’s not going to be Jack killing the villains (who, rather conveniently, happen to all live in the same area as Jack’s from) as that would be interesting and this isn’t that kind of comic. But we’re never given clues as to who the killer might be so it’s not something we can follow or become too invested in. It’s not clear why the murders are happening now either. And the killer turns out to be some rando we’ve never seen before anyway so it’s an underwhelming finale to say the least - nobody was ever going to figure that out.

I suppose, in addition to the art, the backups capture the vapid silliness of ‘90s Image superhero comics storytelling, where it was only about what the artist felt like drawing that day and the writing/characterisation/story/etc. was a distant afterthought. But that doesn’t make those backups any more interesting to read - they’re still as dull as the real thing.

I got the impression the story was trying to be something more than it was - maybe some kind of mid-life crisis story told via nostalgic superhero comics? - but it never came together convincingly. As it is, Local Man, Volume 1: Heartland is quite a forgettable and weak postmodern superhero story that’s never all that entertaining to read, but quite pretty to look at.