Phil Hunn
Mar 24, 2008, 01:04 pm
<a href=" http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/covers/marvel/foolklr4.jpg" target=“_blank"><img src=" http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/covers/marvel/foolklr_sm.jpg" hspace=10 align=left alt="Foolkiller #4"></a>Reviewer: Phil Hunn, philiphunn@hotmail.com
Story Title: Foolproof
“Always the garbage metaphors.”
Writer: Gregg Hurwitz
Penciler: Lan Medina
Colorist: Avalon’s Andy Troy
Lettering: VC’s Joe Caramagna
Production: Paul Acerios
Asst. Editor: Daniel Ketchum
Editor: Axel Alonso
Editor In Chief: Joe Quesada
Publisher: Dan Buckley
Published by: Marvel Comics (http://www.marvel.com)
Suggested for mature readers.
Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes not showing something is better than plastering it all over the place. And sometimes, letting your inner fourteen-year-old out to play is not a good idea.
Sadly, the writer of Foolkiller seems to have forgotten this maxim somewhere along the line. Four issues in, and this grisly exercise in gratuitous violence has continually proven that while you can show limbs being hacked off and use naughty words with impunity, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should. This is a staggeringly violent series, and at this point, I’m only continuing to read it out of a desire to finish it off, out of respect to the writer. I tend to do this with limited series anyway (the only mini that I’ve consciously dumped partway through being the execrable tenth-anniversary Age Of Apocalypse miniseries), though, so this is nothing new. But by my troth, Hurwitz is definitely making it hard for me to do so. The series seems to have forgone any attempt to give this new incarnation of the Foolkiller any sort of depth or trace of humanity (aside from brief mentions of Shakespeare’s thoughts on the nature of fools and the emptiness of hell, and one panel’s worth of the chap expressing a touch of envy at one of his targets having a family), in favour of having the man endlessly shoot, stab and hack his way through gangland hoods and thugs in a variety of ever-more-grotesque ways, while his dog routinely rips people to shreds alongside him. And this, remember, is supposed to be the good guy.
The plot of this series, such as it is, deals with a crooked online gambling organisation. This bunch of reprobates has destroyed a man’s life, killed the guy’s wife and youngest daughter, and left his other daughter in hospital in need of a heart transplant. Oh, and they also shoved his hand into a waste-disposal unit for not being able to pay back their money (well, you would, wouldn’t you?). The Foolkiller has taken on this as a charity case of sorts, and is systematically interrogating, mutilating and killing his way to the rotten heart of it all. Meanwhile, a contract killer is on the loose, also busily slicing people up in order to get to his quarry. The amount of gratuitous bloodshed here is quite astonishing, even more than your average issue of the MAX version of Punisher – Frank Castle definitely has nothing on the Foolkiller. The worst thing is, if the Foolkiller’s methodology was actually interwoven with some examination of precisely where he came from – his background has been noticeably neglected throughout this series – it might help justify why the guy is so prepared to go to these kinds of lengths to get his job done. Any expansion on who the guy actually is might make his actions appear significantly more palatable. Is he driven by vengeance of some sort? Is he an ex-soldier, disillusioned cop or embittered victim of mob-related crime? It’s not shown, and that harms the character significantly, in my view. It may be that Hurwitz intends for us to see the Foolkiller’s origin as secondary to the importance of his “mission”, but without an origin to show us precisely why he does what he does, he becomes just another violent thug armed with a gun or a blade, with none of the Punisher’s essential paradoxes (behind Frank Castle’s guns, bottomless rage and skull-embossed Kevlar lies the harrowing story of one man’s tragic descent into murderous psychosis. By contrast, the Foolkiller has none of that – he just looks like a nasty piece of work who enjoys slicing people up and calling it “justice”). To be fair, however, the character “Mr Smith” in the movie Shoot ‘Em Up had only a fraction more background lavished on him, and that didn’t make the movie suffer very much at all.
Lan Medina does a good job with the action sequences, depicting the Foolkiller as a tall, muscular action-hero type with a square jaw and tattooed arms (he has a grinning jester’s face on each shoulder, which is presumably why he goes around with long-sleeved shirts on when he’s not getting down to his grimy “business”). There are some very dynamic action sequences (a car chase in the middle of the issue and the introduction of the contract killer as he gets down to his own particular type of work are done very well, since they are essentially written to play out like a big-screen action-movie, with some ludicrous feats showing up – the shoot-out on either side of a truck’s trailer is pretty well-done, it has to be said. If it were in a movie, I’d probably describe it afterwards as “pretty damn cool”, the way I described most of the crazy shoot-outs in the aforementioned Shoot ‘Em Up). That being said, I wish he’d had a larger quota of quieter scenes to do, as the action does tend to overwhelm the book. The gritty colouring of Andy Troy lends the book a very noir-esque quality – which I suppose fits the unrelentingly grim tone.
As a comic book, Foolkiller could have been executed a lot better. It does appeal to the lowest common denominator in my brain, especially when it comes to the shoot-outs, but I can’t really shake the feeling that if at least some of the gruesome parts of the story were exchanged for something a little less concerned with splattering the reader with blood and gore, it could have established the Foolkiller as a vigilante on a par with the Punisher. As it is, I have to wonder whether he will ever show up again.
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Buy Foolkiller #4 online now from X-WORLD and save! (”http://x-worldcomics.com/yourvirtualstore/shopexd.asp?id=25735”)
Story Title: Foolproof
“Always the garbage metaphors.”
Writer: Gregg Hurwitz
Penciler: Lan Medina
Colorist: Avalon’s Andy Troy
Lettering: VC’s Joe Caramagna
Production: Paul Acerios
Asst. Editor: Daniel Ketchum
Editor: Axel Alonso
Editor In Chief: Joe Quesada
Publisher: Dan Buckley
Published by: Marvel Comics (http://www.marvel.com)
Suggested for mature readers.
Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes not showing something is better than plastering it all over the place. And sometimes, letting your inner fourteen-year-old out to play is not a good idea.
Sadly, the writer of Foolkiller seems to have forgotten this maxim somewhere along the line. Four issues in, and this grisly exercise in gratuitous violence has continually proven that while you can show limbs being hacked off and use naughty words with impunity, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should. This is a staggeringly violent series, and at this point, I’m only continuing to read it out of a desire to finish it off, out of respect to the writer. I tend to do this with limited series anyway (the only mini that I’ve consciously dumped partway through being the execrable tenth-anniversary Age Of Apocalypse miniseries), though, so this is nothing new. But by my troth, Hurwitz is definitely making it hard for me to do so. The series seems to have forgone any attempt to give this new incarnation of the Foolkiller any sort of depth or trace of humanity (aside from brief mentions of Shakespeare’s thoughts on the nature of fools and the emptiness of hell, and one panel’s worth of the chap expressing a touch of envy at one of his targets having a family), in favour of having the man endlessly shoot, stab and hack his way through gangland hoods and thugs in a variety of ever-more-grotesque ways, while his dog routinely rips people to shreds alongside him. And this, remember, is supposed to be the good guy.
The plot of this series, such as it is, deals with a crooked online gambling organisation. This bunch of reprobates has destroyed a man’s life, killed the guy’s wife and youngest daughter, and left his other daughter in hospital in need of a heart transplant. Oh, and they also shoved his hand into a waste-disposal unit for not being able to pay back their money (well, you would, wouldn’t you?). The Foolkiller has taken on this as a charity case of sorts, and is systematically interrogating, mutilating and killing his way to the rotten heart of it all. Meanwhile, a contract killer is on the loose, also busily slicing people up in order to get to his quarry. The amount of gratuitous bloodshed here is quite astonishing, even more than your average issue of the MAX version of Punisher – Frank Castle definitely has nothing on the Foolkiller. The worst thing is, if the Foolkiller’s methodology was actually interwoven with some examination of precisely where he came from – his background has been noticeably neglected throughout this series – it might help justify why the guy is so prepared to go to these kinds of lengths to get his job done. Any expansion on who the guy actually is might make his actions appear significantly more palatable. Is he driven by vengeance of some sort? Is he an ex-soldier, disillusioned cop or embittered victim of mob-related crime? It’s not shown, and that harms the character significantly, in my view. It may be that Hurwitz intends for us to see the Foolkiller’s origin as secondary to the importance of his “mission”, but without an origin to show us precisely why he does what he does, he becomes just another violent thug armed with a gun or a blade, with none of the Punisher’s essential paradoxes (behind Frank Castle’s guns, bottomless rage and skull-embossed Kevlar lies the harrowing story of one man’s tragic descent into murderous psychosis. By contrast, the Foolkiller has none of that – he just looks like a nasty piece of work who enjoys slicing people up and calling it “justice”). To be fair, however, the character “Mr Smith” in the movie Shoot ‘Em Up had only a fraction more background lavished on him, and that didn’t make the movie suffer very much at all.
Lan Medina does a good job with the action sequences, depicting the Foolkiller as a tall, muscular action-hero type with a square jaw and tattooed arms (he has a grinning jester’s face on each shoulder, which is presumably why he goes around with long-sleeved shirts on when he’s not getting down to his grimy “business”). There are some very dynamic action sequences (a car chase in the middle of the issue and the introduction of the contract killer as he gets down to his own particular type of work are done very well, since they are essentially written to play out like a big-screen action-movie, with some ludicrous feats showing up – the shoot-out on either side of a truck’s trailer is pretty well-done, it has to be said. If it were in a movie, I’d probably describe it afterwards as “pretty damn cool”, the way I described most of the crazy shoot-outs in the aforementioned Shoot ‘Em Up). That being said, I wish he’d had a larger quota of quieter scenes to do, as the action does tend to overwhelm the book. The gritty colouring of Andy Troy lends the book a very noir-esque quality – which I suppose fits the unrelentingly grim tone.
As a comic book, Foolkiller could have been executed a lot better. It does appeal to the lowest common denominator in my brain, especially when it comes to the shoot-outs, but I can’t really shake the feeling that if at least some of the gruesome parts of the story were exchanged for something a little less concerned with splattering the reader with blood and gore, it could have established the Foolkiller as a vigilante on a par with the Punisher. As it is, I have to wonder whether he will ever show up again.
http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/maxfull.jpghttp://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/maxfull.jpghttp://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/maxnone.jpghttp://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/maxnone.jpghttp://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/reviews/maxnone.jpg
Buy Foolkiller #4 online now from X-WORLD and save! (”http://x-worldcomics.com/yourvirtualstore/shopexd.asp?id=25735”)