#green wake

Green Wake #1 (second printing variant) (2011)

So much of film noir takes place in New York City. The asphalt streets and shadows cast by the endless lanes of buildings and skyscrapers are a perfect setting for the dark, claustrophobic paranoia of noir. But perhaps no film noir incorporates Manhattan, its politics and its dirty dealings, as a character so much as Alexander Mackendrick's classic Sweet Smell of Success. It's particularly impressive, considering the fact that the world being explored isn't one of criminal misdeeds and murder. It's one of journalism and public relations.

JJ Hunsecker isn't a powerful underworld Don. And Sidney Falco isn't an anti hero torn between crime and decency. He is a desperate press agent, willing to do anything he has to in order to get ahead, and he's not particularly torn between anything. It's the people stuck between them,  JJ's baby sister, her beau, and a woman who's devoted to Sidney even though she deserves better, who get torn apart. There's so much about it that defies traditional noir structure... and yet it truly is noir, drenched in the darkness, the cynicism, the disillusionment, and the seediness of noir, right down to its bones.

JJ Hunsecker might be a columnist and not a gangster, but he's scarier than any other noir heavy. That deep, steady, condescending glare from behind those thick glasses, the measured deepness of his voice as it moves from coolly patient to carefully restrained rage. It's the countenance of a man who knows he can destroy a life by just typing a few words, an assurance that no other noir baddy could possibly have. Perhaps that's why he's my favorite villain. His weapon is the written word rather than a gun or the fists of his goons.

Of course, JJ Hunsecker wouldn't be what he is without Burt Lancaster's performance. Nobody could have ever played JJ like Lancaster. He had a physicality that was perfect for the role, his tall frame so incredibly imposing, dwarfing everyone around him, but it's the intelligence behind it that makes JJ so scary. Lancaster imbues the character with that intelligence, and with the arrogance of a man who knows he has it, which allows for that smug superiority to seep out of every inch of him. All of that makes for a villain so much more intimidating than one whose power comes from violence.

While JJ Hunsecker is truly the most impressive and memorable part of the film, Tony Curtis's Sidney Falco can never be forgotten or disregarded. Where JJ is intimidating, Sidney is desperate. He is the antithesis to JJ in so many ways, so very much lacking in any power and needing so badly to find it, willing to do some really deplorable things to get it. Which is basically what makes him JJ's lackey. The stark differences between the characters, the few places in which they overlap, and how those things effect their interactions, is the thing that makes the movies so fascinating. It's one of the most impressive pieces of character work not just of film noir, but in American film history.

And Manhattan is the dark and beautiful backdrop to it all. There's a dark beauty to it, so much of it being filmed at night, in the dark. The city lights glow as columnists, press agents, and wannabe stars do their dirty dealings out in the open, with the romantic rendezvous of innocent love taking place in secret in the dark back alleys. A lot of films from the golden age of cinema filmed the city in beautiful black and white, and it truly has never looked lovelier than it did in that sharply contrasted lack of color, but Sweet Small of Success captures Manhattan in dark beauty that no other film every managed. It's enjoyable to watch even with the volume muted just to look at the gorgeous photography. So much of that beauty comes from the darkness and where it touches the light.

Manhattan. Not just the world of criminal plots and try hard anti heroes. It's also the world of dirty publicity, desperate politics, and weaponized words.

As JJ says, "I love this dirty town."

The second you see the art in Green Wake, you know that something's wrong. There's a horrifying beauty to Riley Rossmo's art, everything a little bit messy, a little fluid,  the colors a little to dark, a little too muddy. Some of the characters are a little to tall, a little too bulbous, a little too almost-but-not-quite-human. Everything's just a little bit wrong. That's the world of Green Wake. Just a little bit wrong, but beautiful in its wrongness.

It is a murder mystery, just not a normal one, because Green Wake is not a normal town. It's a sort of space in between, where people who are lost, who slip between the cracks end up, without knowing how they got there or how to leave. There's no set government to Green Wake, no real rule of law. So when one of the townspeople is murdered, it's up to two locals to decide to solve the crime. Morley and Kreiger fit the mold of noir detectives, just as much as they don't. But that's the way it is with most of Green Wake. Priests who aren't religious but offer spiritual guidance, memories that are ever present but not entirely tangible, all of Green Wake is just almost there, almost something you can grasp. The readers and the characters are right there together, almost grasping what's going on, but not being able to hold on to it.

Morley and Kreiger do their best to figure out these murders, but their primary concern is less solving them and more tracking their suspect, a mysterious femme who's equal parts fatale and fragile, Ariel. She's leaving a trail of bodies in her wake, and even she doesn't seem to understand what's happening. She's snapped, even more so than the rest of Green Wake, and is floating in a strange in between, holding onto the darkness of the town and fading in and out of her memories of her world before. As the priest tells her, she's lost her tether, and she's been left adrift.

The style of Green Wake is a tricky balance of tone and atmosphere, in both the art and the writing, to manage. It's based both in noirish mystery and abstract terror, which could be two things that aren't entirely easy to pull off together. Kurtis Weibe and Riley Rossmon succeed wildly. The tropes of noir are present; the detectives who make it personal, the mysterious woman wrapped up in the mess, the colorful supporting characters. The themes of isolation, confusion and paranoia are all present, and the town is made a character just as it is in so many great noir stories. But all those things are thrown off their axis a bit. The town in particular, as important to the plot as Manhattan is to Sweet Smell of Success, is a twisty nightmare of a place, more horrifying the deeper we travel into it, a neverending and inescapable maze of horrors. The town feeds the mystery and the mystery feeds the town, in more ways than one.

Green Wake #6 (2011)

Sam and JP talk with Kurtis Wiebe, writer of Rat Queens, Peter Panzerfaust, The Intrepids, and Green Wake. Hilarity, of course, ensues.

I Want More…GREEN WAKE

I love GREEN WAKE. And I miss it.

The emotional and terrific journey though the destructive and desolate town of Green Wake from Riley Rossmo and Kurtis J Wiebe was near on perfection. Disgusting visuals and heartbreaking character moments filled every issue across a run cut far too short.

This book hit me right in the guts both because it is devastatingly well made but also because it sits in a…