Noche Roja

A few weeks ago, Rich Johnston over at Bleeding Cool reported that Vertigo’s original graphic novel line was part of the “walking dead.”  This is in the sense that no new OGNs were being scheduled and the only ones that will be seeing release are those too far along in the production cycle to be cancelled.  Presumably, this means the end of the “Vertigo Crime” line as well.  I posited a while back after reading the first three titles in the line that the imprint wouldn’t be long for the world unless they started putting out better and more compelling titles than what they had published so far (obviously).  At this point, “Fogtown” is the only title I’d recommend without reservation while “Dark Entries” isn’t a “crime” title, it’s still a very good “Hellblazer” story.  This leads us to “Noche Roja,” which exemplifies the quality of most “Vertigo Crime” titles:  competently put together, but nothing to write home about.

Jack Cohen is a former cop now splitting his time between failing as an alarm salesman and a private eye.  While he used to work as a “border liaison” while he was a cop, he hasn’t been over the Mexican border in eleven years for reasons he won’t explain to Paloma Flores, a social worker who comes to request his services.  Turns out that someone is killing and mutilating young women working at a certain factory across the border and she thinks that he’s the right man to put this mystery to bed.  Once there, he slowly comes face to face with his past and his only shot at redemption… but you probably knew that already.

Writer Simon Oliver’s previous series for Vertigo, “The Exterminators,” didn’t run to it’s intended conclusion, but it was still a wild, bizarre and frequently funny ride.  You could tell that he was having a lot of fun poking holes in the artifice of American life though a group of pest control specialists who find themselves up against increasingly menacing forms of cockroaches.  Here, he’s either just going through the motions or trying way too hard to write a “traditional” private eye yarn.  All the pieces are in place, the plot flows logically, but there’s really nothing here that you haven’t seen before.  I don’t know if Oliver intended the setting itself to be the distinguishing part of this OGN, but there’s really little else to separate it from other stories of this kind.

As for the art by Jason Latour, my first impression was that I was glad that he was able or at least intended for his work to be seen in black and white.  Unlike certain other “Vertigo Crime” graphic novels, the art was clearly meant to be seen like this as opposed to looking like it just had the color leeched out from it (see “The Chill,” “The Executor,” and “Rat Catcher”).  However, his art is so dark in some places that it becomes hard to make out the characters or what’s going on in certain scenes.  I know the book was meant to have a “noir” influence, but it’s taken to ridiculous lengths in the art.

There are three more “Vertigo Crime” OGNs on the horizon, including another “Road to Perdition” sequel from Max Allan Collins.  It’s too late for me to be optimistic about their chances to keep the imprint going, but I’d certainly like for at least one of them to show me what the standard should’ve been for the rest of the line.