WildStorm has been a troubled imprint of late, with their latest relaunch resulting in poor sales and a bunch of high-profile titles that never come out, yet aren't popular enough to justify it.  Still, the imprint continues to release curious miniseries such as American Way and Red Menace whose commercial prospects could politely be described as modest, but which at least offer an alternative to the mainstream superhero titles.

Their latest offering is Highwaymen, a five-issue mini written by Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman, with art by Lee Garbett.  Bernardin is a writer for Entertainment Weekly; Freeman is a producer at MTV.   As for Garbett, he's a 2000AD artist from the West Midlands, which isn't quite as glamorous.

It's an odd book.  There's a lot to like about it, but at the same time there are things that just don't click.

The Highwaymen are Able Monroe and Mr McQueen, an odd-couple black ops duo whose heyday was during the Clinton administration.  One drives, the other shoots.  The story picks up in 2021, when a theft triggers a message from the late President Clinton that gets them back together for - you know the drill - one last mission.

This is all fairly standard stuff, but it's nicely handled.  The pacing is suitably tight, and there are some imaginatively staged action sequences.  Road chases are notoriously hard to pull off on the comic book page (cars are inexpressive things), but the book makes it work.  The basic story has been done many times before, but then it's a action spy thriller.  It's not the sort of book that needs to be devastatingly original.

Lee Garbett is certainly a worthwhile find for DC, and he deserves to get some higher-profile work off the back of this.  He's a clear, strong storyteller, and his figures have a hint of Frank Quitely in their expressions and body language.  There's a lot of life to them.

That's the good news.  The problems rest mainly in the decision to set the book in 2021, because the setting doesn't convince at all.  Visually, there's nothing futuristic to it at all.  Judging from Bernardin's promo interviews, this seems to be a deliberate decision ("a future that looks more like today than it does tomorrow"), but I can't work out why.  Predicting the future is a dangerous business, and heaven knows we've all seen too many ecological dystopias or cyberfutures, but this is going too far in the other direction.  It's so un-futuristic as to make you wonder why they bothered setting it in the future in the first place.

At the same time, there are heavy-handed attempts to remind us that it's 2021.  Hillary Clinton is an ex-President, and the incumbent is Japanese.  Israel, remarkably, has "long been synonymous with peace" because they haven't had a terrorist attack "in over a decade."  (Bernardin and Freeman evidently have a lot for faith in the Middle East peace process than I do.)  People talk about mail as being quaintly old-fashioned, even though their technology doesn't seem to have advanced much from ours.  And we're expected to believe Bill Clinton as a heroic mastermind of espionage - something that, frankly, caused me to doubletake and wonder whether I was missing a whole layer of satire.

This curious mixture of understated visuals and clumsy "Did we mention it's 2021?" dialogue adds up to a world that doesn't convince, and leaves me wondering why the story wasn't just set in the present day.  (Not that Jimmy Carter would have been a great improvement in the Clinton role, mind you.)

Even so, it's a strong thriller series with plenty to enjoy.  I don't see it breaking out of the WildStorm ghetto, but what it does, it generally does well.

Rating: B

back | continue