Are you ready to clasp hands, put your foot to the floor and drive off into the sunset? Well, you might want to be as Frank J. Barbiere and Victor Santos’ passionate tale of the interweaving of crime and romance, “Violent Love”, is upon us.
Join us as we take a spoiler free look at “Violent Love” #1 below! And we promise not to drive off a cliff at the end.
Written by Frank J. Barbiere
Illustrated by Victor Santos
SERIES PREMIERE Daisy Jane and Rock Bradley were two of the most notorious bank robbers in the American Southwest. And then they fell in love. Join FRANK J. BARBIERE (FIVE GHOSTS, The Revisionist) and VICTOR SANTOS (THE MICE TEMPLAR, Polar) for a pulp-infused criminal romance oozing with style and action! Double-sized debut issue!
Romance comics is a genre that doesn’t crop up often outside of the small press or webcomic scene and that’s generally a shame. I often wonder if so much emphasis is put on the masculine ideal of the superhero comic that creators are afraid of truly pushing an all-out romance comic in this market. That’s a thought for another time, though, as here we’re talking about “Violent Love” #1, the new crime/romance comic from Frank J. Barbiere and Victor Santos. Inspired by true events, this is a comic that seeks to chronicle the brief but dangerous lives of Daisy Jane and Rock Bradley, two bank robbers who fell in love. If that premise smacks you of feeling very much like a comic version of Bonnie & Clyde or Thelma & Louise, you’re not wrong, but there’s a surprising amount more to it than that.
For one, Barbiere and Santos use the structure of long form, serialised storytelling and the unique storytelling aspects of comic books to expand the story far beyond the scope that you might expect. This issue presents a narrative framing device that allows Barbiere and Santos to skip through the story in a non-linear fashion, focusing on the defining moments of the lovers’ lives. This issue only briefly sets up the actual romance of the title before focusing on the events that set Daisy Jane on her path to become a bank robber. It’s a narrative move the benefits the series in the long run as it develops the characters and their lives beyond their romance. While this comic may present itself in the designs by Dylan Todd of a pulpy, airport romance novel about two starstruck lovers and their rebellion against society, there’s a lot more going on underneath the surface.
This comic feels closer to a biopic in terms of storytelling structure with the romance between Daisy Jane and Rock Bradley being only a factor in the larger story about their lives. It’s an interesting tactic and means that this first issue focuses entirely on some of Daisy Jane’s earliest moments before meeting Bradley. After introducing her as one of the most notorious bank robbers of the Southwest, Barbiere and Santos take the reader back to when she was a wide-eyed young adult wrapped up in a larger, more violent life than she knew.
Victor Santos’ art seems, at first, to embody that pulpy crime comic feeling incredibly well. His linework is focuses on storytelling and the building of the emotion of the page over specific details. There’s a lot of hatched shading which builds the texture of the panels as much as the inked blacks. It’s hard not to be reminded of Darwyn Cooke’s work in adapting Richard Stark’s Parker novels. The colour palette is especially striking as the framing narrative employs very autumnal oranges, greens and browns to evoke a late summer sunset in Texas before switching to the vibrant blues and pinks of California. The way Santos uses colour to evoke the different settings, giving readers a visual shorthand to easily locate themselves when switching back and forth between narratives, is simply sublime.
Perhaps the master stroke, though, is how Santos uses deep reds as a theming colour. Red is a colour associated with both violence and love and is a perfect choice as Santos washes panels in red hues to highlight these keys moments. Sometimes they sprinkle the background of moments when Daisy is connecting with her father and sometimes entire pages are washed in monochromatic hues of red during torture scenes. This comic isn’t for the faint of heart, by the way. It’s called “Violent Love” for a reason and, boy, is it violence. It’s a violence that’s shocking and raw in a very real way. This isn’t violence used for style, to splatter blood across pages because mature, explicit comics are cool now.
Continued belowThis is an exploration of the kind of violence that people do unto others when they are not given what they want. This is a meditation on criminality and the use of pain as a bargaining chip to exploit another. This is violence on a Cronenberg scale with genuine psychological repercussions not just for the characters, but for the reader too. It’s hard to find media in the world nowadays that can cut past the desensitisation of violence that we have and remind us of just how shocking it can be and Victor Santos and Frank J. Barbiere have nailed that here.
All in all, “Violent Love” #1 is fantastic first issue. It is entirely unlike what you might expect given the description of the series as it is much more measured and much more emotionally considered than the pulpy design might imply. A violent exploration of what people do for love and power with fantastic, artistic storytelling from Victor Santos, one of the all time great comic artists tackling the crime genre, and a meditative and almost morose script from Frank J. Barbiere brings “Violent Love” #1 together in a darkly beautiful package.
Final Verdict: 9.0 – This may end up being one of the surprise hits of the year. You’re going to want to get in on the ground floor on this one.
