Written and illustrated by David Hahn
Kit Bradley is a 20 year-old art student and petty criminal who knows it’s time to leave her delinquent past behind, but isn’t ready for the responsibilities of adulthood. Her social headquarters is an all night diner, and while trying to put the ‘off’ on an on-again-off-again boyfriend, she runs into an old flame, and an enigmatic loner named Martha, who alters Kit’s life forever.
David Hahn takes a break from the Suicide Girls to tell us a story about people who, so far, keep their shirts on. There is of course more to it than shirts but that’s all after-the-jump stuff.
David Hahn always turns up in the weirdest places. I think I first saw him when he drew Bite Club for Vertigo, working with Howard Chaykin and David Tischmann. The next time I spotted him, I believe it was on Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane (or was it Mary Jane Loves Spider-Man?). Then he was the fill-in man for one of my favorite artists of all time, Philip Bond, on the Wildstorm series Red Herring. Now, he’s doing Suicide Girls with Cameron Stewart, another of my favorites. Also: this. All-Nighter, my first intentional dosage of Hahn for Hahn’s sake. Writing and illustrating the book, it gives me a taste of the guy’s sensibilities when divorced from collaboration — nothing shows a comic book creator’s true colors better than making them do all the damn work themselves, because nine times out of ten they’ll only bother with their passions and whims.
All-Nighter is about Kit, a teenager who’s bound for art school on a full scholarship. She’s also perpetually broke, and trying to get over her whole habit of, you know, stealing people’s things and fencing them for money. Her boyfriend isn’t so conflicted about that, but then again, she’s also trying (and presently failing) to break up with him. Then there are her friends, and her family, and other blessings and hindrances. There’s also the fact that apparently, Kit had her own mother killed.
Why Kit would have had her mother killed is not really high-priority in this first issue. It gets brought up a couple times, but it’s a locked box, something Kit throws out when the story hits a quiet spot, to make sure we’re still focused on her. Having done my own time in art school, I find the most engaging part of Kit’s character to be the question her very existence poses. Art school breeds the sort of people who feel like they have something special to say, so they do things like write about comic books for free on the internet. It also breeds the sort of people who love the idea of framing their lives like they’re living in movies or books, of imagining what narration would work best over whatever they happen to be doing, or what Magnetic Fields song would perfectly suit the soundtrack for that scene.
Kit comes off as deathlessly self-involved, wrapped up in the youthful egotism that comes from being a teenager (and therefore functionally immortal, each moment lasting forever and possibly the most important of your entire life, until one day you’re in your mid-20s and wondering what happened). When she describes why she wants to break up with her boyfriend, it comes down to the idea that she can’t date someone who’s into heavy metal. She phrases it so tritely (and yet with a degree of wit) that it tells us everything we need to know about her narration: she’s the sort of person who’s young enough to believe that it’s not her fault or her boyfriend’s fault that they’ve grown up and grown apart as people, or even that it’s just something that happens as people grow out of puberty. No, it’s as simple and elemental as the music. If you’re under a certain experience threshold, you might side with her; if you’re past it, you might chuckle ruefully at remembering a time when you believed the same thing.
Plot-wise, we’re not up to much. Kit tries and fails to break up, steals some stuff, looks for a new housemate. This issue is more about feeling the vibe of things, getting to know the characters who’ll be tied up in the rest of the story. There’s definitely an eye toward a complete trade-paperback here — just enough meat to survive serialization, but skinny on actual story nonetheless. The characters are fun to be around, though, which forgives a lot of sins, and the elegantly jagged designs set into Hahn’s artwork are never difficult to look at. It’s like getting to know someone by reading the last week’s of their Facebook posts, but there’s room to go all kinds of places from there.
Continued belowIf I’m right, All-Nighter will end up a slept-upon story of slick teens up to no good, like Jamie McKelvie’s Suburban Glamour, or even Dave Gibbons’s The Originals. It’s good for kicks and you might even find a catchy phrase you can swipe, but you won’t be left with any profound lessons, and it’ll be over before you can get tired of them (comic books, unknown descendant of Pete and Pete). When I was reading this, my music player shuffled onto “Girl Least Likely To” by Morrissey, and damned if it wasn’t a perfect fit. “Oh, one more song about the Queen,” goes the song, “or standing around the shop with thieves; ‘but somebody’s got to make it!’ she screams, ‘so why, why can’t it be me?'”
So I sit, and I smile, and I say ‘well done.’
Final Verdict: 7.0 / Check it out all right
