Graphic Novel Review: Noir
The premise behind Dark Horse’s Noir is pretty simple: take some of the biggest names in the world of crime comics and put them in one spot. Each creator or creative team has up to ten pages to tell a self-contained story, and all of the stories are crime stories. With a collection of talent that includes Brian Azzarello, Dean Motter, Paul Grist, and the Criminal team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, one would expect Noir to be an easy home run. Unfortunately the uneven nature of the stories keeps this collection from being anything to write home about.
While none of the stories in this collection are bad, a lot of them are pretty lackluster. There’s nothing about half of these stories that gives the reader anything to grab on to. Some of them are great concepts – like Chris Offutt, Kano, and Stefano Gaudiano’s story about an aging hitman who’s sent on a suicide mission to take down his replacement – that don’t live up to their promise. Part of the issue with those stories may be the time constraint. The creators have to establish the situation and then pay it off within less than ten pages. This can result in some awkward ‘info dump’ dialogue, as in Gary Phillips and Eduardo Barreto’s story about a woman seducing her gym trainer for purposes that are not revealed until the final three panels of the eight-page story. Another issue is that a lot of the stories rely heavily on twist endings, which don’t always work. The Phillips and Barretto story in particular has a twist that is just too complicated for its own good, which results in the aforementioned info dump. With the others where the twist fails, it’s largely because it was telegraphed or just plain predictable.
There are several stories that work on different levels, though. The opening story by David Lapham follows two boys as they argue over what to do with a girl they’ve kidnapped and locked in a trunk. It’s a powerful story because the characters feel like real people, and the outcome of that story is both disturbing and satisfying. Similarly, a story by Jeff Lemire about the owner of a failing farm is ingenious in its simplicity. Another by Rick Geary has a twist ending that is so darkly funny you might even laugh out loud. Some of the twists are about comeuppance, but Geary’s is more about coincidence, and it’s enough to turn a good story into a great one. The story by Brubaker and Phillips also has a twist to it, but the twist is more on the reader than on the characters. They establish a well-walked noir story – the femme fatale who manipulates men into doing what she wants – and then turn it on its ear on the final page.
Page 1 of “The Bad Night.” Art by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba.
Perhaps the most notable story of the collection is the final one, “The Bad Night” by Brian Azzarello, Fabio Moon, and Gabriel Ba. Moon and Ba channel Azzarello’s 100 Bullets collaborator, Eduardo Risso, in telling the story of a down-on-his-luck guy who takes a job as part of an insurance scam. The story is one scene, showing the guy, who goes unnamed, ‘interviewing’ for the job. To say much more about the story – what the scam is, how it’s to be carried out, and who it’s for – would be to ruin the experience of reading it. It suffices to say that it adds a new layer to a well-known piece of pop culture. The story’s twist is one of implication, and it will make you want to read the story again immediately.
Overall, Noir is an average collection of stories, with a few stand-outs. Fans of Mister X and Kane will be pleased to find new stories by Dean Motter and Paul Grist, respectively, featuring those characters here. The Lapham, Lemire, Geary, Brubaker/Phillips, and Azzarello/Moon/Ba stories are each worth the read on their own, and prop up the rest of the collection pretty well. Admittedly, it’s hard not to be disappointed that more of the stories weren’t of higher entertainment value. Still, the darker side of human nature is on full display in Noir, to varying degrees of darkness. In that respect, the book succeeds in doing what it set out to do.