“F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack: Scar-Lip Redux” does a great job of building a classic thriller on top of supernatural elements. Repairman Jack is fundamentally a private detective who solves problems no one else can. He’s cut from the Hammer detective mold, a hard hitting man who makes up for being not particularly brilliant by being a little more determined and little more street smart.
Or in this case, monster smart.
Repairman Jack lives in a world of horrors and abominations. In “Repairman Jack: Scar-Lip Redux,” he has come into the world of comics to fight Scar-Lip, an old fiend.
What bugs the hell out of me is that Scar-Lip doesn’t have a scarred lip.
Written by F. Paul Wilson
Illustrated by Antonio FusoAn original graphic novel starring Repairman Jack – written by series Creator F. Paul Wilson and illustrated by Antonio (James Bond) Fuso.
Got a problem? He can fix it. He thought he’d seen the last of the Rakoshi, but one has survived. A particularly cunning and deadly Rakosh known to Jack as Scar-Lip. Now, Jack faces the fights of his life as he seeks to end the creature once and for all, before it ends him!
Repairman Jack is franchise supernatural thriller. He’s appeared in a dozens stories and novels by F. Paul Wilson, but this is his first comic outing, and my introduction to him and his world.
Wilson writes of a dark world where hiring an assassin on the dark web can connect you with a humanoid tree who operates as a spy master. It’s a tight detective story delicately smashed into a dark urban fantasy.
Repairman Jack features some great tropes: a word-wide traveling freak show, Lovecraftian elder things, magical spy technology, and an Ent. It’s a world with a hard magic system, where the mystic and the magic is defined, limited, and predictable. By the half-way mark of the story we know the mechanism of how ol’ Scar-Lip is summoned, and how that mechanism is delivered. Frankly it’s more explicable than James Bond gadgetry from the Roger Moore era.
Many of the characters in Repairman Jack are memorable, if not particularly round. It’s a feature that comes with the territory of franchise protagonists: they’re built to last, not to surprise. Jack himself is the most nondescript of the story, by choice, the introductory narrative tells us. But it still leads to spots of confusion in the artwork. Any time there’s two stocky, middle-aged men in the same panel I start to lose track of whose who.
The world building is top notch. F. Paul Wilson is drawing on 35 years of stories and lets his world simply exist without explaining every detail, giving a texture to every conversation and moment. But a lot of the credit is owed to the artist, Antonio Fuso. Repairman Jack lives in Jersey and operates in New York City, and Fuso never lets us forget it. Almost every page has a beautiful New York skyline, a richly textured streetscape, or gorgeous architectural details. It does a lot to ground this supernatural story in our own world, as much as Lovecraft did with Newburyport, Peabody, and all the horrifyingly-real New England towns.
The story is thrilling, but not every piece of the writing hits a home run. In one scene, a Christian police officer is told there is no god. The conversation is barely more than: “Our life is meaningless.” “No it isn’t.” “Yes it is.” Then he commits suicide. It’s a bit extreme. If the human mind was that fragile, atheists on the internet would be responsible for a thousand suicides a day. There is a long tradition in Cthulhu-inspired fiction of our barely-evolved monkey brains being simply not built to comprehend the vast indifference of the universe, and turning itself off once it realizes that fact, but Wilson doesn’t do enough to earn that story beat.
As much as I loved the world building built into the artwork, other choices by the artist just confused me. At one point it’s said that Scar-Lip doesn’t show up on camera, because it’s a creature so utterly alien to our world. “Scar-Lip doesn’t photograph, Jack.” This is said right after the artist drew the monster pretty clearly in a series of photographs down the page, with clear outlines and reflecting enough light to show shadows of muscles. I can’t tell if this is a stylistic choice that didn’t land, or a miscommunication in the script.
Continued belowAnd like I said earlier, Scar-Lip doesn’t have a scarred lip. No one ever comments on this.
The artwork at its best is brutally simple, blocky and clear, and that works for this raw detective story. Pippa Bowland smartly colors in Scar-Lip with deep, blotchy blues while keeping everything else clear and simple. Antonio Fuso gives uses some inspired inset panels to highlight nearly-microscopic details in the story, and has one astounding two-page spread of our blue planet hovering above a cosmic chessboard. If there’s a better metaphor for the underlying truths in the swathes of Lovecraftian-inspired stories, I haven’t seen it.
There’s a great tradition of supernatural detectives in novels and comics, think Clive Barker’s Harry D’Amour and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. The detective story is an easy genre to slide into any sort of world, it lets the reader explore all manner of custom-built dark underbellies. Repairman Jack: Scar-Lip redux is a solid, though warty, entry in that honorable genre.
