#scalped

Santa (me) brought me (Santa) an early present. I am now committed to buying the 1st and 3rd volumes.

Scalped No. 25 - This Then Is the Rez (High Lonesome 1/5)

My comic for June! The second collection of Scalped is in many ways more of the same – though somehow even more relentlessly seedy and noir and universally cynical about the hope of any sort of moral improvement. Which contrasts somewhat oddly with how exaggerated and cartoonish certain characters seem, but I suppose that just makes it the true heir to the pulp tradition (which certainly tracks for the book’s treatment of women).

Picking up right after the last volume left off, the book follows (ostensibly) Dash Bad Horse, prodigal son turned FBI agent with a grudge, and (mostly) a variety of other colourful figures who call the Prairie Rose Reservation home. The book is concerned first and foremost with the fallout of Gina Bad Horse (Dash’s mother)’s death and secondarily with the silent partners in Chef Red Crow’s lucrative new casino worrying about their investment and sending some ‘help’ to keep matters in hand.

For all Dash is theoretically the hero of the whole series, this really is Red Crow’s book – and thank fuck for that. Not the most original character in the world, to be sure, but one out of a 2000s prestige crime drama instead of a schlocky action movie. Even if the plot pulled him more towards that role as the story moved on. His wrestling with moral anguish and how utterly unprincipled all his ‘allies’ are after Gina’s death is actually quite compelling and (walking atrocity of a character that is Mr. Brass aside) really enough of a story to make the whole deluxe edition a worthwhile read. The whole story really does become shockingly better whenever it forgets that Dash is supposed to be the main character.

The rest of the characters very from decent to a chore to read, but all go through their arcs with relentless thematic cohesion. This is a story about giving up on your principles to survive, or help your friends, or just to cope. Good choices are hard to come by anywhere in this book, and characters that end it better than they started almost nonexistent. Which I’m really quite a fan of – shame the only two women with names in the whole thing were the heroin-addicted femme fatale there to drag Dash into sin and the gnomic grandmother there to be the moral standard everyone fails to live up to. Gina was sorely missed.

It did all just get a bit monotonous as well. There was a lot of really rubbing in people hitting rock bottom and then not showing them going anywhere else. Combined with all the action scenes, it felt like far less happened in these ten issues than the first deluxe volume.