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A review by colophonphile
Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke
The artist Darwyn Cooke reminded American comics of their mid-century mystique and allure. With this, his adaptation of the hard-boiled detective-less novels of Donald Westlake (who wrote them under the name Richard Stark), Cooke visits the era's underbelly.
Well, that's what the original novels were: dark, bloody stories of an anti-hero named Parker who commits crimes, kills people, hurts people (often women), and still manages to make you want to read the next one. The Parker novels are the ultimate refutation of that lazy criticism "Oh, I didn't like it -- there was no one to relate to." The only characters most readers of a Parker novel might remotely relate to are Parker's victims, and yet still we keep reading.
In Cooke's hand, the settings and characterizations of the first novel in the Parker series are more Mad Men, more Breakfast at Tiffany's, than the original seemed to be. They're more "uptown." Parker is more handsome (even the introduction states he was intended to look like Jack Palance, but instead we get something closer to an American version of Golgo 13, or of Clark Gable on steroids). The settings are more glamorous. With a few exception, the goons look like male models.
But it's still bracing stuff, told with a mix of casual familiarity and carefully paced action. At times the book feels less like a careful adaptation, and more like a drawn journal that Cooke kept while reading the original novel -- there will be a few images, and handwritten description of the plot as it unfolds. But most of it is told with an economy and elegance (there are numerous wordless passages, true to Parker's malevolent silence and the absence of introspection that it represents) that is rare in mainstream American comics.
In the end, I think this book is more enjoyable to fans of the original than it might be on its own, but I am so engrossed in the source material, I am not the best judge. I do recommend this adaptation, heartily.
Well, that's what the original novels were: dark, bloody stories of an anti-hero named Parker who commits crimes, kills people, hurts people (often women), and still manages to make you want to read the next one. The Parker novels are the ultimate refutation of that lazy criticism "Oh, I didn't like it -- there was no one to relate to." The only characters most readers of a Parker novel might remotely relate to are Parker's victims, and yet still we keep reading.
In Cooke's hand, the settings and characterizations of the first novel in the Parker series are more Mad Men, more Breakfast at Tiffany's, than the original seemed to be. They're more "uptown." Parker is more handsome (even the introduction states he was intended to look like Jack Palance, but instead we get something closer to an American version of Golgo 13, or of Clark Gable on steroids). The settings are more glamorous. With a few exception, the goons look like male models.
But it's still bracing stuff, told with a mix of casual familiarity and carefully paced action. At times the book feels less like a careful adaptation, and more like a drawn journal that Cooke kept while reading the original novel -- there will be a few images, and handwritten description of the plot as it unfolds. But most of it is told with an economy and elegance (there are numerous wordless passages, true to Parker's malevolent silence and the absence of introspection that it represents) that is rare in mainstream American comics.
In the end, I think this book is more enjoyable to fans of the original than it might be on its own, but I am so engrossed in the source material, I am not the best judge. I do recommend this adaptation, heartily.