Hard Time is the first title from the DC Focus imprint.  The premise is supposed to be that it's a world which has superpowers but not superheroes.  And yes, that is rather similar to the concept of the New Universe.  However, this is pitched rather differently.  Although it's not labelled as a mature readers title, the tone of Hard Times is a kind of middle ground between the DCU and Vertigo.

Fifteen year old Ethan Harrow is sent to jail for fifty years after a highly ill-advised reconstruction of Columbine goes horribly wrong.  Ethan's got superpowers, but that doesn't alter the fact that he's being effectively packed off to rot in jail for most of his life.  It seems a rather limiting idea for a series, but then Oz has done perfectly well with a jail setting.

The Columbine massacre was almost five years ago now, but school shootings don't seem to have faded from the agenda.  On the contrary, they appear to have cemented themselves as one of the standard images of modern America gone wrong.  As well as the obvious horror implicit in the idea that somebody could go nuts and kill you at any moment - and they could, and there's nothing you can really do about that - it also plays into a broader sense of impotent bemusement as to quite why these things happen, and denial that there aren't any simple answers.

Ethan is really guilty of nothing more than extraordinarily poor taste, but because he's stumbled upon a cultural trigger, he finds himself being offered up as a sacrificial lamb to public opinion despite the fact that the evidence against him is less than persuasive.  Naturally, he's not a wholly sympathetic character - he tries to restage the Columbine massacre as a joke, for god's sake - but in the context of a society that's too busy persuading itself that it already has all the answers to actually spend any time looking for them, he fits easily into the victim role.

Steve Gerber is writing, with art from Brian Hurtt (probably best known for his work at Oni).  Hurtt is not a conventional superhero artist, but then the Focus line seems to be bending over backwards not to look like conventional superhero books.  Brian Haberlin is colouring the entire line, and all four DC Pulse titles are getting strikingly unusual colours.  The palette isn't so much muted as bound and gagged, as most of the issue is done in greytone with bursts of colour occasionally making their way past the murk.

The washed-out, exhausted look of the book works for Hard Time, where the story has a similar tone of frustration and despair.  I'm less sure about how it's going to work on the other titles - on Touch, in particular, it seems to be kicking against art which is trying to be more dynamic.

DC are obviously taking a risk by launching a line of comics featuring completely new characters, especially when those comics aren't really superhero books.  I strongly suspect that DC see these books as having a future in bookstores - the curiously outsized lettering seems tailor made for reduction to digest size, and the pages actually look better in the smaller-scale previews.

But Hard Times, and the other Focus books, seem to be a very downbeat alternative to the material that's currently being offered in that format.  DC must be gambling on finding a gap in the market; god knows this isn't the sort of material that traditionally goes down well with the existing comics audience.  Nonetheless, it's a good book - well worth picking up.

Rating: A-

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