Pulling from the Stack of Unread Shame, this time out it's Steve Gerber and Brian Hurtt's Hard Time: 50 to Life, the trade paperback collection of the first half of Hard Time's initial run in DC's how-fast-can-we-cancel-it Focus line.

Really, I probably wouldn't have gone near this on my own. But the book was getting good reviews at various and sundry blogs. Heck, Ringwood even had a contest to give away the trade. Still, I waffled, because I'm like that. Then The Pickytarian positively gushed about the book:

You will be rewarded with a rich story that bursts at the seams with more engaging characters and entertaining plot threads than any mainstream American comic on the stands today.... And any fan of cartoon art should treat themselves to the work that Brian Hurtt is doing on this title. His combination of drawing "chops" (perspective, anatomy, line, shape, tone ,etc), cartoony exaggeration, and storytelling skills make him one of my favorite comic artists of all time.

Okay, fine. The blogosphere found Street Angel for me. And She-Hulk. If that many people are going on about it, surely it's worth a look? So, Christmas money do your thing, and there I am, possessed of one more trade for the stack.

My review here is actually going to be pretty spoilery in comparison to most of my stuff. So the usual cut tag comes with a stronger warning than normal:

Hard Time: 50 to Life

The first chapter is mostly set up. Eight pages let us watch protagonist Ethan and his friend, Brandon, play Black Trenchcoat Brigade. We see Ethan's powers first manifest when he accidentally kills said friend to try to stop his wild shooting spree, ending the siege and bringing the police storming in.

The bulk of the first chapter that follows focuses on Ethan's prosecution, both in court and in the media. And it's more or less what you'd expect: the popular kids can't understand why people would hate them. Everyone with any kind of wound to salve (including the parents of the kid who actually went nuts and started blowing people away) blames Ethan. Those Damn Talk Shows exploit the case for ratings. Then there's a nice long speech by the judge that sounds much like every other Dramatic Pronouncement of Sentence I've ever seen on a courtroom drama.

But, hey, this is the set up. I can forget the boring origin if I have to. The premise of the book requires Ethan to be in jail for a seemingly endless amount of time, so that's where everything should really pick up, yes?

Not so much. The characters are pretty much prison flick standard: there's the weakling you know's going to bite it, the macho hispanic, the sage veteran, the crazy religious guy, the effete homosexual / transsexual. And assurances to the contrary, the plots by and large don't do much more to surprise me. We get the humiliating cavity search / hose down, crazy neo-nazis, someone doused and set on fire, and I swear if Ethan failed to notice one more room emptying out so someone could "have a talk" with him, I was about to toss the book at the wall.

Ethan's version of a prison weapon is, I'll grant you, clever and generally unexpected (even if how he obtained it is, again, transparent and predictable), but that's one of the last bits in the book, by which point there's little time left to prove more cleverness is available. Actually, there's just time enough to convince me that last bit was a fluke, as we throw in solitary confinement as a plot point.

The only thing that really stands to set this book apart is its supernatural element, Ethan's "power." But even that isn't all that amazing, and at times simply confused me. I had a difficult time figuring out just what his power was supposed to be doing, especially during its first few manifestations.

Brian Hurtt's work, if marked by a few early gaffes concerning Ethan's height, is generally clean and readable. Using Hurtt's softer lines on a book about harsh living provides a nice tension between the narrative and the visuals. This isn't helped, though, by Brian Haberlin's shades of blue palette. Maybe it's just me, but I associate blue tones with night lighting in comics. I kept wanting to yell at someone to turn on the lights. Likely the blue is meant to contrast with the bright red tones that Ethan's power colors everything with. But when we learn halfway through the book that this bright, strident light covering everything is in fact an invisible force, I'm not quite sure why it's being used as a light source, either.

Despite blogospheric sentiments to the contrary, I didn't think Gerber did much new or interesting with either of his major genre influences here. Instead, it felt like I was supposed to find the decision to graft super-powers onto a prison flick setup in and of itself to be inventive. But high concept only gets you so far, and I can't say as the execution of this one did much for me.

Tags: comics, reviews