The Fix vol. 2: Laws, Paws, and Flaws

A deceased debutant’s dildo.  A masturbating millenial mayor.  A merchandising meth-head named Matty.  These are just some of the new wrinkles introduced to the irreverent craziness of the plot of this series.  Roy, the cop who likes to think that he’s a smooth operator, is dealing with the fallout from the death and subsequent mansion explosion of the starlet he was supposed to be protecting.  While this case may be the big break his budding showbusiness career needs, it might be derailed in short order if the side business he and his partner have with some meth-heads turns out to have been the reason she died.  Speaking of his partner, Mac may not have any illusions about his smooth operator status, but he’s actually managed to forge a solid bond with the one morally upstanding character in this series:  Pretzels, the drug-sniffing beagle.  Now Mac just has to leverage that friendship so that his suburban crimelord boss can get one of his guys through the TSA screening.

If the crude humor and poorly-timed social aspects of the first volume didn’t turn you off, then I have great news!  Vol. 2 of “The Fix” offers up much more down-and-dirty jokes and jibes at the expense of proper social etiquette.  No, the boundary-pushing nature of writer Nick Spencer’s humor doesn’t always hit the mark, but it does much more often than not here.  It’s also impressive to see how much effort he’s put into creating this wild and weird take on L.A.  Witness meth-head Matty’s detailed thoughts about his current life situation and goals.  Partner-in-crime Steve Lieber is also fully committed to this debauchery, particularly in the mostly wordless two-page sequences where it feels like he was given free reign to be as absurd as he can within the story.

There is one big issue with this volume and that would be how little the story progresses in the four issues contained here.  Granted, this is only a four-issue collection.  Yet one only needs to look at what Brubaker and Phillips did on the similarly-sized “The Fade Out” collections to see that you really can advance a story in a trade paperback of this size.  If they want to keep me reading then Spencer and Lieber are going to have to work a lot harder to make sure the next volume actually moves the narrative forward.