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Strike Three
Heathen City Vol. 3: Joker to the Thief
Written by: Alex Vance
Bad Dog Books
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you liked Heathen City Volume 1: Always on the Run. It had action, it had suspense, it had a lot of gay sex. It even ends on a cliffhanger! So you wait a year for Volume 2: Paved with Bad Intentions, to find out what happened to all these characters you’re interested in, only to find out that the second issue is going to be all flashbacks and origin stories. Well, ok… I mean at least Malloy is in it a bit, even though the story takes a very different turn, going from a shallow, but action packed conspiracy thriller to an overly complicated supernatural tale.
So now it’s 2010, and Volume 3 is finally out, and you’re going to find out what destroyed that city. Or maybe what was up with those cowboy ghosts. Hell, at the very least we’ll find out what happens to the protagonists that have been missing from the entire second volume.
Oh wait, no. Nevermind. None of those things happen. And here are no less than 12 new characters for you to wonder about.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this story is not near as interesting as the author thinks it is. The real strength of these books are the characters, but they never quite get the treatment they deserve. There’s only so much ham-fisted dialogue I can stand before I begin to feel ill. For me, it was when the panther, who is Italian I guess, really hammers in that he is both a tough-as-nails cop, and bilingual, with a thank you that reads like a parody of every bad cop film: “Molto-fucking-bene.”
Author Alex Vance has a nasty habit of raising questions and never answering them. Vance has said in interviews that he’s teasing the story out on purpose, but this is absolutely the wrong way to do it because it looks like he’s confusing vagueness for subtlety. Every page reads like he made it up on the fly. Twists and betrayals and some crazy-ass shit are thrown in here, but I still don’t know what the motivation is for anyone, even after an entire volume that tried (and failed) to provide exposition for the major events of the story.
Malloy is really the one character I can do without. He’s one of the most egregious Mary Sue characters in literature. At one point in the story (spoiler alert, kids!), Malloy realizes he can’t carry all his friends out of a building about to explode. It’s totally set up for Malloy to lose someone he cares about, the first tragic death of one of the heroes. Then on the next page you find out he managed to save them all anyway, and even had time to write a mean note to one of the villains. Nevermind that one of said friends seemingly died from being riddled with bullets 10 seconds prior. Nope! He survived somehow.
This has been an unfortunate motif through the entire series. Vance sets up these “How will Malloy get out this time?” situations, then he just breezes through it, no sweat. It makes him boring to follow because he’s apparently invincible.
But what makes Joker to the Thief even worse is that Malloy doesn’t really get out of shit. He pulls out some grenades in Volume 1, ends up killing dozens of people (cause he’s a bad dog, get it?), get’s rescued by somebody, gets sold out, then gets captured by the very same people he tried to escape at the end of Always on the Run. Plotwise the story hasn’t progressed an inch, and none of these new characters got enough to development for me to figure out if they’re important or just throwaway side characters.
I haven’t even mentioned how off the rails the story gets with the main villain and his mom. Actually is Caufield even the main villain? Who the fuck knows! It’s clear that Vance just wanted to write a story about him, though, which makes sense because he’s the only character with any development. That alone automatically makes him the most interesting character in the series, and I actually found myself getting intrigued by him. The supernatural element gets spiked up to a serious degree, and it makes the story go a bit too crazy. Make that a lot too crazy. Honestly if I could have Vance answer any question about his story it would be, “How did Caufield’s ghost travel in time to kill his mother and take her through alternate realities, then merge with her soul then travel in time again and do it all over as a single hermaphroditic entity?”
I’d also throw in, “WTF dude? Seriously.”
If these books were coming out every couple months, this ridiculously drawn out plotline would just be annoying, but for an annual series, it’s unforgivable. Volume 2 was already really annoying in that it about faced, so this was Vance’s chance to get the series back on track. The fact is, the entire graphic novel can be summed up with “Malloy gets captured, but escapes again. Caufield dies, but then doesn’t”.
The book is illustrated by a team of 14 talented artists of differing scales and styles. Each of them illustrates a different part of the narrative thread, or sometimes a splash page. It’s jarring to keep turning the page and have the art style significantly change, and I felt like I wasn’t able to fully appreciate each artist because I kept having to switch around every time a scene changed. Still they all do a good job, and I wish it was easier to figure out who did which part because some of the art in here is very good.
At this point, my professional advice to readers is to abandon ship, unless things turn around drastically. My advice to the author is to take this story, sum it up in, oh, eight pages, and really work on tighter storytelling. Figure out who the protagonist is (Owen, Malloy, Italian Stereotype Cop? …Caufield?), and work on strengthening the core characters. Figure out the end game. Write one more volume, stop wasting our time, and just finish the god damn story.
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