Written by Gary Phillips
Illustrated by Marc LamingSPECIAL $1 DEBUT ISSUE! Acclaimed crime novelist Gary Phillips (THE JOOK, VERTIGO’S ANGELTOWN and COWBOYS) returns to BOOM! with a new brand of crime! High finance and low-down greed rear their ugly heads as Jeff Sinclair, the premiere laundryman in San Francisco–and we’re not talkin’ wrinkled jeans and dirty gym socks–is unwillingly pulled into a dangerous gig laundering $25 million in stolen casino skim money. Forced to truly consider his line of work and the evil that he facilitates, Jeff must find a way to clean the cash and wash away his own sins. A grounded, gritty look at the world of money laundering in the vein of Elmore Leonard, THE RINSE is a modern crime classic in the making! For fans of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s CRIMINAL!
This book is already being compared to some of the best genre comics of recent memory. Does it live up to its hype? Find out after the jump.
If you think a book about money laundering would be one dimensional and boring, you would be very mistaken. Phillips and Laming do a phenomenal job of dropping the reader into a fully formed world that exists somewhere between the modern-day and the grizzled Los Angeles (pronounced angle-ess) of 1940’s pulp fiction. From the first page, we understand our man, Jeff Sinclair, and what he is all about. A no-nonsense guy with a vocabulary straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel, Sinclair’s job is to launder money. He prides himself on having a good batter’s eye for potential clients, but when Hank Winslow approaches him to launder money stolen from a Las Vegas casino baron, Sinclair’s greed and sympathy take over for his intuition and he accepts what seems to be a cursed job.
The language Phillips uses is reminiscent of Rian Johnson’s modern-day film noir Brick, which mixes classic hard-boiled phrases into modern day vernacular into dialogue which becomes both familiar and unusual. Sinclair isn’t presented as an anachronism; everyone in this world has one foot in 1949, either in the way that they speak or the way that they dress. Sinclair’s narration is similar to that used in the novels of Chuck Palahniuk (like Fight Club or Invisible Monsters), where our main character tells us little tricks of the trade and spontaneous thoughts in between his interactions with others. By the end of the first issue, you know more about money laundering than you did before you started.
Laming’s artwork is streamlined and beautiful, and is enhanced by Darrin Moore’s elegant and simple colors. Every location feels real and lived in, and all of the characters are drawn with wonderfully expressive faces. For a story with only one real action sequence and a lot of exposition, the art keeps the story from feeling static and instead draws your eye constantly. The colors in particular do a really nice job of telling you exactly what time of day it is, and through the course of the issue, shadows grow longer and the sky goes from blue to red to black. Without saying so in the text, the art tells us that this story takes place in one day.
The story feels real at every turn except one; Sinclair’s escape in the subway seems unnecessarily far-fetched for this type of story. It is the one point when reading the comic that I was taken out of the story and needed to suspend my disbelief. And if that is my biggest complaint about the comic, then that should tell you how much I really enjoyed it.
Another perk of this issue is its price: $1.00. This is a perfect impulse buy for the next time you’re at your local comic store; it will be the best dollar you spend all week. Well worth what Sinclair would call a “dead president” or a “founding father.”
Final Verdict: 9.4 – Enthusiastic Buy
