The Killer #1

[mrosa]

This Franco-Belgian series, written by Matz and drawn by Luc Jacamon, follows an experienced hitman whose sanity is cracking. In his latest assignment he has to wait for the target to arrive home, so he can shoot him from an opposite window. But the target is taking a long time to show up, and the hitman starts reminiscing about his past, and all the people he's killed before.

This particular passage captured my attention:

This is his remembering one of his hits. A woman paid him to take out her husband, and he does it in the most unexpected of ways:

Comments

[icon_uk]

Love the art style, but the hit doesn't seem to be too weird. If you're an assassin, you might very well use your targets dangerous hobbies against them

As I remember someone saying on an old TV show... Tucker's Witch IIRC, when they find out how much an assassin is asking for a hit "For that sort of money you don't get a 'hit', you get 'natural causes'"

[lonewolf23k]

That's the difference between a hired thug and a professional. A professional adapts.

[big_daddy_d]

Such as it is in the Hitman games... like a boss

[ensiform]

As a Francophone and a BD fan in general, I like the look of this. Indeed, in its noir tone, the tough-but-cool characters, the clipped speech, and the narration, it reminds me of Brubaker's lesser work.

(wink!)

[psylynce]

I saw what you did there. ;)

This art is really lovely. I was particularly taken by the underwater scenes, specifically the bubbles. Who knew I had a thing for bubbles?

[icon_uk]

Bubbles, eh?



Hello!

Or, this being scans_daily, in the interests of balance...



Hello!

[psylynce]

I like the cut of both those bubbles!

[mrosa]

I only posted this scene because it caught me by surprise, since I never saw a hit carried out like this, I liked its novelty. You won't hear me hype this book like the best ever. In any event, I doubt Brubaker could come up with it. His character would just pay a thug in a sleazy dive bar to beat someone up with a bat, that's the pulpish, Chandleresque stuff that makes his heart throb, from what I understand.

Regarding the narration, I think that's funny, considering that of the 6 pages, almost 4 are silent panels, forming a long wordless sequence. I was reading his Criminal: The Last of the Innocent a few days ago, just in case I were being unfair to him, because I hear it's supposed to be his best work, although it was banal as everything else, and I was struck by the ceaseless narration. So I just checked again now, and these are my findings:

#1: 4 silent panels.
#2: 6 silent panels
#3: 3 silent panels
#4: 10 silent panels

Brubaker, for a comic book writer, doesn't trust pictures very much. That's why we get Velvet narrating everything while she's beating up a squad. At least here, the protagonist is alone in an apartment, whiling time away, tense from waiting for his target, and that leads him to reminisce, there's at least a justification. When he's on killing mode, like here though, he doesn't narrate every single panel.

Not to mention his narration, when he goes on about Nazi massacres, the banality of evil and Stanley Milgram's experiments, is frankly more interesting than Velvet's "I have to get out of here. Find out who's framing me up. Oh, I'm hurt, maybe I should use the stairs," she says, right in front of a staircase just in case the reader's conceptually impaired or something.

How's your wink now?