VAPOR TRAIL #1
by Chris Lamb

Peter Milligan’s HUMAN TARGET and the lo-fi thoughtful spy thriller THE BOURNE IDENTITY share a lot of the same genetic make up: Shoddy memories and violent pasts; Incredible fighting skills learned and hardened in places best not mentioned; The struggle to pick a sense of identity from a mess of disguises and passports with wrong names and signatures.

This isn’t the point. I’m not interested in parallel lines so much as the way they’re colored in.

BOURNE IDENTITY is quality work, stretching the guts of spy fiction out over a two-hour chase scene and tacking on a brain to keep things interesting. After years of “spy flick = James Bond,” it initially hit me not so much like a breath of fresh air but as Christ the Returned, spreading hope and joy to every one and leaving red footprints all over the new carpet. But later, when the new idea crackle wore off and I could focus on the work actually being done, it failed. For all its new approach to old ideas, BOURNE IDENTITY is still at the service of a PG-13 rating and the trappings of big studio filmmaking. I still enjoy the movie, but can’t help wanting more afterwards. I want the clever ideas abandoned along the roadside out of need to keep the story – and Matt Damon – running forward. I want the lives that go along with the names in his safe deposit box of passports. I want heroes without the Hollywood-dictated third act salvation.

Hence HUMAN TARGET. Hence comics and this column. VAPOR TRAIL is bi-weekly justification through autopsy, taking apart comics to examine what works in them that don’t in other media. We’re a bastard medium, the marginalized offspring of other forms with twice our respect and half our talents. Comics have the potential to out-distance its forefathers with brains and speed for a tenth of the money, but month after month that potential goes either unrealized or ignored. We tried to play by movie rules. We adopted the dress sense and one-liners of the summer blockbuster, and it has made us lazy. So fuck it, let’s talk about what works, about the creators and books pushing the limits of what comics can do and finding they give under pressure. Keep your bored commentary and hands in the air moaning. Here we’re gonna talk about the tricks that keep me reading and the elements that could be used to bring in new readers if they new where to look.

Peter Milligan writes action suspense stories with spy tinting, riffing on the Ian Flemming realization that terrible work requires terrible men, or at least creates them. His Christopher Chance has gone freelance after years as a professional counter-target, taking on jobs at his choosing and doing the work as his shattered moral compass mandates. He’s the hero of the book, the character you most relate to. He’s also a monster. Chance’s value of human life shifts like the wind, with life or death decisions made in the heat of the moment and what the circumstances mandate. You want to root for him; you want him to make it to the end of the book in one piece. But there’s always a nagging voice in your head that isn’t sure he deserves to. Milligan has created a character that couldn’t exist in another environment. Film would saddle him with a conscious and kid sidekick to show him every life is precious, glossing over the twists that set him apart from the run-shoot-kick cookie cutter crowd. Prose would rob the reader of the blank stare Chance wears when dispatching bad guys or, to more chilling effect, the cock-sure smile that occasionally sneaks in while he’s working.

Basically, if Christopher Chance had been disguised as the doctor on the fishing boat that rescued Jason Bourne, he would have pulled the chip thingy out of his skin, shot him in the head and dumped the body back overboard.

Let’s talk about Cliff Chiang’s artwork. There’s nothing astounding here; Chiang is a solid artist with good line work and an eye for action shots. But sweet Jesus, look at his layouts. In issue ten, “Five Days Grace,” the establishing shots of the prison and subsequent break out that would have made up the first twenty minutes of a film are handled in two pages. He tells five days worth of story, flipping between the exploits of two versions of one man in twenty-three pages of comics. And he does it without any unintentional confusion; running right along the edge of what compression can do without falling over into a clusterfuck. There’s no difference of style or quality between fight with an entire police precinct (spread over five pages) of Grace’s slick escape from a gunfight in a bar (one panel). Knock the simple form all you like, when you can fill a Volkswagen with artists that trump Chiang on function, we’ll talk.

And where THE BOURNE IDENTITY trips over its limitations, HUMAN TARGET soars. Milligan and Chiang are crafting a story tailor-made for telling through comics; using the medium’s freedom to be as brutal or subtle as needed and using the space available to explore the back roads and alleys that grow up around the book. The result is something far more satisfying and superior to its film counterparts, capable of more depth and range than the version raking in the tall dollar box office takes.

So there you go. Christopher Chance is Jason Bourne with a full set of adult teeth and his balls dropped. And for all its good, there are only two movies with Matt Damon doing the smart spy thing, while HUMAN TARGET happens every month and does the job with more brains, style, and humanity for three bucks a pop.

Pick up the book, and remember what you started reading comics for.

HOW TO FIND IT:
TITLE: HUMAN TARGET
WRITER: Peter Milligan
PENCILS & INKS: Cliff Chiang
COLORS: Lee Loughridge
PUBLISHER: DC/Vertigo
PRICE: $2.95

Chris Lamb lives and writes in New York City. All of it. At the same time.


PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum.


Industrial Archive - Read past Industrial articles