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robin_dh's review
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
The clubs are like perfumed handkerchiefs lying in fields of shit. My dreams are full of panthers. My dreams are full of leather and cream, of warm piss and sour milk, metal and fire, satin walls sweating wine, fat tongues lolling on marble, fields of golden pubic hair, sheets smeared with soft bananas. My sleeping and waking dreams. My Extremist dreams.
francoisvigneault's review
4.0
I've been rereading some of the old series I recall from back in the day (this one is from 1993/94, published by the then very new Vertigo imprint). Very interesting to revisit a book like this, with its themes of sex, violence, and race, more than a quarter century later. Not only has the culture moved and shifted, my own experience and awareness is quite altered.... For instance picking this up now the now vanished, scuzzy pre-dot-com-boom San Francisco setting jumps out at me, having lived in the city for nearly a decade, but when this came out I was still in high school (!!!), I wonder if I even recognized references to "The Western Addition" (perhaps "The Haight"). Now the book's nods to classic noir and tales of obsession like the film "Vertigo" are much clearer.
"The Extremist" is a taut story of psychosexual horror, and could I think be easily translated to the screen (much like another Milligan book of the time, [b:Face|17425619|Face|Peter Milligan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1361821625l/17425619._SY75_.jpg|24281733]). The story here is simple: A woman finds out that her husband was a member of a clandestine sex cult called "The Order," and soon finds herself taking on his role as "The Extremist," a leather-clad, sword-wielding enforcer. The Extremist costume itself, a tangle of leather straps and with a metal ring on its mask serving as an all-seeing Cyclopean eye, emerges as a character in its own right, impassively watching the human drama that unfolds around it. All in all great, visually iconic stuff that could translate well to a noir-inflected horror film.
The characters are almost all nasty and unpleasant people (BDSM and kink swiftly open the floodgates to overt racism and somewhat more obliquely-referenced rape), and [a:Ted McKeever|52922|Ted McKeever|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png]'s drawings are purposefully unpleasant, rough graphic slashes and drybrush, the characters all angles and sneering lips. Almost all the superficial sexiness is (appropriately) drained out of the story to reveal something deeper, darker, and crueler.
The narrative takes an interesting turn when the focus changes to Tony, a salt-of-the-earth, working-class black man who inadvertently becomes involved in The Order's machinations. Reading this now, the race and class issues jump right off the page, even more so than at the time of publication. Tony finds himself drawn towards The Order and The Extremist, but is continually, unremittingly rejected, he literally and figuratively doesn't fit in (one of the books most enduring images encapsulates this divide in a single panel).
Reading it now, I couldn't help also seeing the resonances with the intense transformation and gentrification that San Francisco has gone through in the 25 years since "The Extremist" was published, as black and poor people have been pushed further and further out, and the City has become more and more a playground for the very rich. "The Extremist" shows some of the beginnings of this change. The seedy, working-class world of San Francisco that is shown here was already quickly disappearing when I arrived in the late 90s, and now it is pretty much completely gone, making "The Extremist" a sort of oblique time capsule of a vanished time, just like Hitchcock's "Vertigo" before it.
"The Extremist" doesn't have too much that is new to say, but I also don't think it needs to. It's a tight little tale of sexual obsession, violence, and horror. It's stuck with me over the years, and that's enough.
"The Extremist" is a taut story of psychosexual horror, and could I think be easily translated to the screen (much like another Milligan book of the time, [b:Face|17425619|Face|Peter Milligan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1361821625l/17425619._SY75_.jpg|24281733]). The story here is simple: A woman finds out that her husband was a member of a clandestine sex cult called "The Order," and soon finds herself taking on his role as "The Extremist," a leather-clad, sword-wielding enforcer. The Extremist costume itself, a tangle of leather straps and with a metal ring on its mask serving as an all-seeing Cyclopean eye, emerges as a character in its own right, impassively watching the human drama that unfolds around it. All in all great, visually iconic stuff that could translate well to a noir-inflected horror film.
The characters are almost all nasty and unpleasant people (BDSM and kink swiftly open the floodgates to overt racism and somewhat more obliquely-referenced rape), and [a:Ted McKeever|52922|Ted McKeever|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png]'s drawings are purposefully unpleasant, rough graphic slashes and drybrush, the characters all angles and sneering lips. Almost all the superficial sexiness is (appropriately) drained out of the story to reveal something deeper, darker, and crueler.
The narrative takes an interesting turn when the focus changes to Tony, a salt-of-the-earth, working-class black man who inadvertently becomes involved in The Order's machinations. Reading this now, the race and class issues jump right off the page, even more so than at the time of publication. Tony finds himself drawn towards The Order and The Extremist, but is continually, unremittingly rejected, he literally and figuratively doesn't fit in (one of the books most enduring images encapsulates this divide in a single panel).
Reading it now, I couldn't help also seeing the resonances with the intense transformation and gentrification that San Francisco has gone through in the 25 years since "The Extremist" was published, as black and poor people have been pushed further and further out, and the City has become more and more a playground for the very rich. "The Extremist" shows some of the beginnings of this change. The seedy, working-class world of San Francisco that is shown here was already quickly disappearing when I arrived in the late 90s, and now it is pretty much completely gone, making "The Extremist" a sort of oblique time capsule of a vanished time, just like Hitchcock's "Vertigo" before it.
"The Extremist" doesn't have too much that is new to say, but I also don't think it needs to. It's a tight little tale of sexual obsession, violence, and horror. It's stuck with me over the years, and that's enough.
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