Killer’s retirement ends when he allows himself to be recruited by old friends, first Katia then Mariano, to return to being a hired assassin. He travels from Cuba to England to Paris, but all the while Killer is principally a philosophical tourist, not a geographical one. Ennui is getting to Killer; he satisfies his contracts in a perfunctory way, but all the while his mind is focused on a rambling philosophical commentary about the malaise of the human condition.
We can see that Killer’s philosophical sympathies are existentialist in nature when he tells Haywood that there is “no such thing as paradise, nowhere, nohow. The problem is human beings make any place hell.” You could even call it a dead giveaway, as Killer is here paraphrasing a famous line from No Exit, by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people.”
Killer may deserve his namesake by fulfilling his contracts so easily that it seems second nature, but his “first nature” is as a cultural critic, sniping at the consumer mores of Europe and the USA. Probably the most eloquent passage concerns Killer’s position on what he perceives as the hypocrisy of Haitian relief efforts:
We rush to the four corners of the world to save earthquake victims who were dying from hunger before, when no one cared, and who’ll die of hunger again when the rescue workers leave, along with the cameras. But we saved them from the rubble! What a feat! We sent them checks! What generosity! What a fine conscience we have. Until the next disaster, as long as it’s photogenic. The bloodier the better.
At one point in the narrative, Killer notes his distaste for business suits and ties, but he seems to take a renewed interest in his work when he becomes a partner in a burgeoning Cuban oil company and becomes one of the corporate suits himself. Not that he’s any business groupie quoting Sun Tzu or Anthony Robbins at this point; he prefers the rhetoric of individualism and idealism. Quoting Ortega Y Gasset, he thinks that “a pessimist is someone who lives with optimists,” and he is neither, he says. He is a man apart, and holds the bulk of humanity in contempt. Killer even takes the criticism to much of the book’s readership as he paints black the modern life of people that waste their “days in a mediocre job for mediocre pay…sit down to mediocre food and watch shit on tv…new car, the country house, kids, the latest fashionable gadget…” You can even imagine Killer laying into reviewers of the graphic novel as he critiques those that “slave away on a blog that, with imprecise language and deficient spelling…anecdotes meant to be cute and moving…which are more or less boring, convinced as you are that the net’s a basic need and fundamental human right.”
Killer Volume Four : Unfair Competition earned a Mature rating from Archaia for the depictions of violent killings and panels of sex, but what makes the book truly mature is Killer’s critical commentary on life as it is lived today, a commentary that is all the more ironic as it lashes out at the readers themselves. What comes into his sights more often than not are not only his physical targets but the weak points in the readers’ minds. In one tirade on Europeans, Killer has nothing but contempt for those who “veg out by the tv and surf the web for porn or gore,” and what is this graphic novel on the surface except for death porn leavened with a little bit of sex? With the images removed, all that is left is the nonstop commentary. Killer makes a show of visiting his wife and son for a few pages every now and then, but the heart of the story is in the text boxes that are packing heat of a different kind–a never-ending philosophical salvo. With his rejection of modern culture and technology, his periodic escape to the jungle, and his meditative philosophy and criticism, Killer is a Thoreau for the 21st century.
Killer Volume Four : Unfair Competition is illustrated by Luc Jacamon and written by Matz. It is published in the U.S. by Archaia, and has been available at comic shops since July 17th. It will be released to quality booksellers on July 30th, and is available for preorder on Amazon. Volume four is unavailable digitally, but previous volumes in the series are available digitally on comiXology and graphicly.
