REVIEW(S): Two Adaptations.

Out of the blue, The New Press sent me a review copy of Harvey Pekar and company’s “graphic adaptation” of Studs Terkel’s seminal Working. Maybe they heard that I keep a copy on my nightstand or something (no, really, I do — I’ve mentioned how invaluable it is, right?) or perhaps I was just lucky. Anyway. I have nothing but admiration for Harvey Pekar, but the too-verbose adaptations written by him for this book, when fused with frequently-amateurish art and low-end production values – seriously, one piece is lettered in Comic Sans, as if this isn’t 2009 and there aren’t a number of free and low-cost typefaces for comics that won’t make your piece look like Aunt Hildegard let you borrow her computer for a few hours while she was picking up her diabetes medicine – left me wondering what the point was.

Curiously, there are a couple of very nicely-done pieces that seem to be from another book entirely – Danny Fingeroth (!!) and Bob Hall (!!!) (with some very polished lettering from Janice Chiang) handle Rip Torn and Steve Hamilton’s stories) and seemed to show what this book could have been in many places. I also should point out that even if I’m not fond of the aesthetic, comix vet Sharon Rudahl acquits herself very nicely in the several pieces contributed. For the most part, though, this book is a failure; a dismal, lifeless piece that misses the vibrancy of the original even as it reverently recreates most of the text. If you’re going to include 90% of the original text in the pieces and just use illustrations to buoy up the original content here and there, then you’re missing the point of doing comics.

However, Darwyn Cooke’s much-ballyhooed and anticipated comics version of Richard Starker’s The Hunter is pretty much a master course on how to do this kind of thing. Cooke’s taken the original novel and stripped it down even further, letting the reader savor the interaction between a plot that never stops and vibrant, two-tone art that actually tells the story versus providing illustrations for the narration. I was 90% sure this was going to be a success when this was announced — Cooke’s one of my favorite comics creators and his 2005 issue of DC’s Solo and subsequent run on The Spirit showed that he knew how to do comics noir without falling back on the familiar Sin City-isms — but I was honestly surprised at how enthralled I was with the book.

In my first reading, I devoured the whole thing in one sitting and then rereading it several times over the next few days, going over my favorite sequences: pages 34-37 of my review copy feature a suicide and subsequent disposal of the body in a sequence that is part storyboard, part elegy to a dead romance, notable for its near silence; the end of Book Two with its bang-up set of splash pages and the opening of Book Four, a darkly funny sequence where Parker handles some goons even as he speaks to one of the people responsible for his current plight. All of these highlight how effortlessly Cooke plays to his strengths as well as those of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake’s original narrative.

If you can’t tell, I think this is the book to beat so far this year, not just in its genre, but as a definitive example of the medium. There’s a preview up at IDW’s site, and it’ll be on shelves in July.