“Fearless” Chuck Fairline is crossing the country fighting mascots – need I say any more to sell you this book?
Written by Chad Bowers and Chris Sims
Illustrated by Scott KowalchukOne man versus every mascot in professional sports. THEY WILL ALL BE PUNCHED. It’s kick-off time for this year’s most action-packed and hilarious comic!
“Fearless” Chuck Fairlane was football’s fastest rising star, but his career came to a screeching halt when he was expelled from the league after goin’ HAM and causing the biggest brawl in the history of sports. Years later, Chuck has found peace as a high school football coach, until costumed mascots begin attacking him for seemingly no reason. Before long, Chuck’s going to discover that you can’t run away from the past—but you CAN punch it square in the face!
(In the interest of full disclosure, let me say this: Chad Bowers, co-host of the Hour Cosmic and Multiversity contributor, is my brother from a Southern mother. So, no matter how hard I try to separate my opinion of Chad from the book itself, I can only do that to a certain extent. That said, I will try.)
There are few activities with less crossover than football and comics – or so the movies and TV would have you believe. The only thing that would seem more out of place on The Big Bang Theory than a three dimensionally written character would be if Sheldon suddenly started professing his love for the Cowboys. “They’re America’s team, you know,” he’d say, and the studio audience would be stunned into silence.
But that’s TV – that’s not real life. Multiversity has a number of die-hard sports fans, as well as non-sports fans, which proves the point: comics are for everyone. You don’t have to love superheroes, or only read Tintin, or trim down your likes and dislikes down at all to dig comics. If anything, the hard thing about converting a new fan is giving them something to read that will appeal to them.
Which is where “Down Set Fight” comes into play. This may be the comic that the casts of both The Big Bang Theory and Friday Night Lights can agree on.
The first thing you need to know about the book is that it is funny – very funny. The fact that “Fearless” Chuck Farlaine teaches at Darius Rucker High School is worth the price of admission alone, but the book manages to find humor in all corners. A good bit of that credit goes to Kowalchuk, as he is able to milk humor out of unusual places, and make every panel worthwhile. Facial expressions on stoic characters can be hard to make unique, but Kowalchuk manages to give the smallest difference in mood a unique look across Fairlaine’s mouth.
While on the topic of Kowalchuk, his layouts, especially in the fight sequences, do a fabulous job of bringing the reader into the world of the comic by playing with perspective, panel size, and using interesting camera angles to tell the story. The mascots, one of the key visual elements of the book, are handled perfectly. Each one is more over the top than the next, but they all look cheap in that way that all mascots look low rent. The same goes for all the fight sequences – sure, Chuck might lunge at a guy or deliver a punch to the nose, but all of the brawling remains somewhat grounded, in terms of what a regular dude would know about grappling. Of course, he manages to take out dozens of mascots at a time, so the book isn’t beholden to the rules of the real world either.
The book, as a whole, really pays attention to detail, without falling victim to being minutia-obsessed or fact-heavy. There are no monologues about the rules of football; instead, the attention is placed on the smaller, human elements of the story. Something as simple as Chuck’s father calling him “Charlie” when the rest of the world calls him Charles or Chuck is a detail that screams reality, and instantly tells us something about both father and son.
Of course, none of that would matter if the story wasn’t entertaining, and it most certainly is. Bowers, Kowalchuk and Sims create a story that is almost deceptively simple on the surface – man fights mascots – but has a rich tapestry running underneath that main story. Regret, pathological addiction, family dynamics, the nature of fandom and loss all feed into what is, essentially, a redemption story. If there is a major criticism to have, it is that the story feels a little rushed in the back end, and could have used another 20-30 pages to tell its story to its completion. The solicitations read “Volume 1,” so there is hope for more of this tale, so perhaps that critique will sting less a few years from now, when volumes 2 and 3 complete Chuck’s story.
Final Verdict: 8.5 – Buy
