Frezno's Comics Challenge: February 2024 (Pulp)

Hello again, and welcome back to Frezno's Comics Challenge! In case you missed last time, and also to bolster my intro out to a nice and solid paragraph before I actually begin my work here, I am doing monthly comics criticism as curated by my pal and professional comics critic Sean Dillon. Last month was in my wheelhouse, a story about battling magical girls who tried to kill each other while in love for the good of their corporate masters. It was a very good book, and if you click that link in this paragraph you can read all about how I turned it into one corner of a Bermuda Triangle which began to define my 2024. Having completed that, it's time to talk about the book I read in February. Saddle up, partner, because we are entering the world of the Western, sort of. Let's talk about Pulp.

When my grandpa drank, he fell and broke his face in two

When the cops arrived, he exclaimed, "I fought in World War II"

And then they carried him to a darkened hospital room

And said, "No modern person here remembers you"

Like Of Thunder And Lightning before it, I want to begin talking about Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips's Pulp with a focus on color. This is not a two-tone comic like Of Thunder And Lightning, but we are hit with a color even before getting into the comic proper. Its opening pages and tone setting are awash with orange, and what does that mean? Pairing it with the story I just read, a poignant image comes to mind that defines Pulp for me. It is the bright, yet mournful image of a sunset upon the western horizon. It burns bright, but it is a brightness about to fade away from view. Pulp has a similar view of the Wild West, vignettes of it reminisced on by the elderly ex-gunman Max Winters who now dusts off and fictionalizes his gritty stories of life on the New Frontier for sale to a magazine to make a living. His stories play out for us, stained in sepia save for the bright crimson of his cowboy's shirt, but the modern day of New York 1939 is presented with more realism and grace.

Focus on that image. Focus on Max Winters, weakened by age with a bad heart, struggling to make a living in a world so far removed from the life of a gunman in the Wild West. To take some parlance from another Western which inspired me once upon a time, Max lives in a world which appears to have moved on, the life or death struggles and losses of a cowboy now just entertainment for young boys. Even Max and his stories are obsolete, pushed out of his job for a young lad who will write for half the salary. As his heart falters, even the word balloons of the comic themselves blur as his hearing and consciousness fade. This is a world that has forgotten the face of the gunslinger, forgotten those old heady days, and has left him behind with a bad heart and too many bills to pay. What can a gunslinger do in the modern world of 1939?

Take up your guns and fight against the bullies. It is 1939 in America, and across the pond there are some notorious bullies that America does not care about right now. It's not 1941 yet. They don't care, so long as it doesn't happen to them. Some of them are even on the side of the bullies, letting hate fester in their hearts. So it is that the elderly gunslinger is drawn into one last stickup, breaking the law to do the right thing and stick it to some fucking Nazis. As it turns out, the world moving on has its advantages. Yes, it means that you are forgotten as an exile in a once-remembered land. It also means you have the element of surprise, so when you show up as a gun-toting cowboy it gets the drop on this modern world. Is it really that different, after all? There are still the downtrodden and discriminated in need of help, now more than ever. Be it bandits who want to shoot you for your bounty in the desert dust, or fascists who domestically abuse or discriminate, it turns out that the world can still use a gunslinger.

Bang.

So it is that the last gunslinger faces down one more bandit, walking into a saloon with a gun at his belt and ready for one final shootout. His affairs are in order and he has lived a good life. Sundown is not a tragedy to be wept over. Its bright orange is sad, but it is beautiful as well... and orange can represent something else. It can represent the muzzle flare of the last gunslinger blasting a wife beating Nazi right in his fascist fucking face. It takes a monster to know a monster, and the outlaw killer of 40 years hence knows these monsters and knows how they must be fought. To the death. That's Pulp. A sunset. It's a beautiful thing to see, a sad ending of the day as darkness and night falls, but it is also a searing hot ball of flame radiating its heat and light down to us. It is beautiful and bittersweet and just a little violent, but it is something to be admired. That's how all that happened, and that's a comic I read in February.