At this point maybe I should just change the title of my weekly Small Press Spotlight series to the Archaia Comics Spotlight. Every Archaia comic I’ve read lately has been an absolute smash hit in my mind and has been completely deserving of the spotlight I’ve been giving them. Unsurprisingly, we have another Archaia title.
This week we have Matz’ and Luc Jacamon’s exceptional title The Killer. When this series was originally being released, I remember hearing universal praise for it yet I still did not pick it up. Given the opportunity to read it I can only say one thing: why were people underrating it so much?
See the rest after the jump.
To start this synopsis out, I’ve only read the first volume of this title. All praise is derived from that first volume. If the second volume finds Matz and Jacamon taking our unnamed protagonist to Euro Disney and becoming convinced he’s in a cat and mouse game with Mickey as his sanity slowly melts away, well…I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about this first edition in which we are introduced to the titular assassin, a man held in high esteem for his meticulous nature and his “limitless” patience. That patience is being tested on a hit in Paris, in which he’s been waiting for over a week for the mark. The set up created by Matz is a clever one, as it allows him to use the waiting to slowly pick at the killer’s mental armor and to tell his back story as a college student who falls into the business quite naturally.
The story is told as a journal like narrative, with our unnamed “hero” guiding readers along the title with his thoughts. Dialogue itself is at a minimum, as Matz uses internal dialogue to place the reader in the shoes of this man whose mental state is beginning to crack throughout. It seems as if his limitless patience is perhaps a bit more finite than he let on, and eventually this leads to a mistake and a escape. I won’t go into too much detail, but let’s just say this: sometimes paranoia is deserved.
While it may be deliberate for some American audiences, this translated from French title’s pacing is expertly handled by Matz. French writers and film makers have always seemed to have an expert grasp of the inner workings of killers and crime (see: Luc Besson’s Leon), and Matz is no exception. The whole volume is a slow burn deconstruction of the killer’s reality, and his fragile mental state allows for some very exciting moments in the latter half. Not only that, but he develops the killer to be a character of substance, as he is biding his time until he can quit the business and retire to Venezuela. He may be merciless, but at least we know he’s human.
Luc Jacamon’s art throughout is exceptional. As I mentioned recently in the comments section of another one of my posts, Jacamon’s art recalls a mixture of Darwyn Cookie’s classic, cartoonish look with Hayao Miyazaki’s oft exaggerated but always wondrous imagery. While he typically presents his images within rather standard layout forms, Jacamon mixes it up enough to keep the reader on their toes throughout. Repeated standard paneling can defeat even the best artists.
The color palette he chooses allows for the scenes between characters to be all the more intimate and the scenes where it is just the killer to feel all the more solitary and oppressive, which contributes to the believability of the degradation of his mental state. All aspects of Jacamon’s art ably work in concert with Matz’ story, creating a beautiful synergy on the page.
Matz and Jacamon managed to create a classic story of the troubled hitman with The Killer, and its steady growth in praise throughout the last couple years has not really made it’s way into the ranks of your average superhero comic reader. While it isn’t quite the brisk pacing a lot of you are used to, this is about as well told of a comic as you will find on the market. You can pick it up for the absurdly cheap price of $13.57 at Amazon, so you pretty much have no excuse. Drop a couple of the weaker titles in your pull list and you’re set.
