Westerns, WWII, and Crime. Put ‘em in a blender and what do you get? A slurry of strange ideas, an affinity for guns, and the questions of where the lines between lawlessness and criminality really lie or, in another word, a pulp story. Or in another, another word THIS “Pulp” story.
Also lots of punching in the jaw. Why they love punching in the jaw?
Cover by Sean & Jacob PhillipsWritten by Ed Brubaker
Illustrated and Lettered by Sean Philips
Colored by Jacob PhillipsMax Winters, a pulp writer in 1930s New York, finds himself drawn into a story not unlike the tales he churns out at five cents a word—tales of a Wild West outlaw dispensing justice with a six-gun. But will Max be able to do the same when pursued by bank robbers, Nazi spies, and enemies from his past?
One part thriller, one part meditation on a life of violence, PULP is unlike anything award-winning BRUBAKER & PHILLIPS have ever done before. This celebration of pulp fiction set in a world on the brink is another must-have hardcover from one of comics’ most acclaimed teams.
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have never turned out a bad book together. Never. Every new project takes a classic genre or smattering of sub-genres – Crime, Noir, Horror, Thriller, Coming of Age – and asks what makes it tick, where the humans are, and realigns the genre’s tropes and cliches to serve that element. To try to praise the two separately in “Pulp” would be to do a disservice to the two of them and to the work itself, as well as to Jacob Phillips’ colors, which, while not quite as lush as previous colorists on his father’s art, perfectly evoke the two worlds of the comic: that of 1939 NYC and of the romanticized, color-bled, pulped past.
That said, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Sean break from his usual repertoire of faces. Having a set of characters that look and feel distinct helps set “Pulp” apart from the rest of the team’s oeuvre. Uch, I just said oeuvre, didn’t I? Let’s talk Nazi punching instead, because it’s always good to punch Nazis.
The story of “Pulp” is deceptively simple. An aging pulp writer, who bases his adventures on his life, looks for one last score after the legit world does what it tends to do and screws him over. Set against the backdrop of a pre-war America welcoming to Nazis, enough to hold a march through Times Square and a rally at Madison Square Garden (not depicted but probably referencing this event,) and you have all the elements necessary for a good old tale of robbery, desperation, and punching Nazis. While we get it all, Brubaker and Phillips remind us at every turn that they don’t do straight pulp fiction. They love the hell out of it all but they interrogate the assumptions of the genres, of the romanticized nature of the “wild west” in westerns, of the glamorous final stand in any crime story, and of the pure intentions of a “good war” and the perfect America imagined in most post-WWII depictions of the war and its lead up within the country.
“Pulp” is just as engrossing and tense as any traditional piece of pulp fiction though. Years and years of projects have allowed Brubaker and Phillips to hone the tension-release cycle of their works to perfection. There’s a constant knowledge and dread that something is about to go sideways because of the character’s personality, desperation or the unknowable luck of the universe, but you can never be sure when or how or even if it will, though if there’s one constant in their work it’s that actions have consequences, both the good and the bad. Then, when it goes well or completely falls to shit, an up ‘till then unknown breath is released from your chest.
The central drive of the narrative, namely the desperation of Max because of the publishing industry’s theft of his character and stories, paying him less and less, while he reaps none of the financial success, is conveyed very bluntly but the emotional impact is not lessened by that. If anything, the bluntness allows us to understand why Max would do something so reckless as try to rob a movie theater’s money transfer or accept Jerimiah’s plan to rob the American Bund. After living so long in a past that’s just as flimsy and false as the newsprint his stories are printed on, despite knowing the solid details he cannot put onto those pages, he believes bits of the stories he’s told himself.
Continued below“Pulp” is about the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves, our culture, our past, our present and our future. It is about how the messiness of reality conflicts with our stories, how reality can be even stranger than fiction, and what happens when we take the wrong lessons from the aforementioned stories. It is also about how we tell them because we want to build a world that can reflect the best aspects of our imagination.
Brubaker, Phillips, & Phillips have done it again and in only 80 pages crafted a tale that is at once a love letter to the genres they mash-up and a modern examination of the follies and successes of them, with room for fucking up some Nazis and a critique of the work-for-hire practices that built the modern corporate comic industry.
And, one more time for the back: Fuck the Nazis.
