PARKER: THE SCORE & PARKER: SLAYGROUND

Last week I spent most of my time talking a bit about the Parker character, but I paid little mind to Darwyn Cooke's artwork. This time I plan to correct that. But first, we'll have a quick rundown of the plots of both THE SCORE and SLAYGROUND.

THE SCORE is a tale of Parker and a dozen associates taking on a job to rob an entire small mining town in the middle of the night. And, much as I stated previously that I liked the prior Parker stories for their showcasing our anti-hero doing everything right and accomplishing his goals without a hitch, I also really like the fact that THE SCORE throws a major wrench into the operation in a twist I don't really want to reveal here, sending Parker and company into a panicked retreat before their operation can be successfully completed. Where the previous stories showed us a cool, capable Parker executing his plans flawlessly, this one gives us a Parker who must improvise in order to save his skin.

Both approaches suit the character very well, and it should be noted that even when everything is going wrong, the plan crumbing around him, Parker takes it all in stride and remains as calm as ever. I guess I should amend what I said last week (and elaborated upon this past Sunday): I like seeing ultra-competent characters do everything right, but I also like when said ultra-competents are forced to wing it and do so in as unruffled a fashion as possible. I think really, what I don't like are panicky characters who dig themselves into deeper holes when they find themselves in a tight spot. To quote one John "Hannibal" Smith, I suppose you might just say that I love it when a plan comes together.

PARKER: THE HUNTER & PARKER: THE OUTFIT

As I confessed the other day, I had never read a single thing by Darwyn Cooke prior to this year. Somehow the guy just sort of slipped under my radar for pretty much his entire career. I'd seen his artwork now and then, and I was aware of JUSTICE LEAGUE: NEW FRONTIER, but mostly he just looked like sort of a Bruce Timm clone to me.

Nonetheless, people seemed to love the guy's work. When he died unexpectedly last spring, I made a note that I would definitely check out something he'd done, with NEW FRONTIER at the top of the list. But instead, by way of the big Comixology IDW sale back in October, I wound up reading his PARKER graphic novels first.

Parker was created by the late Donald E. Westlake under the pen name of Richard Stark, as a sort of "anti-hero" in a series of pulp novels published over the course of forty years. In 2009, Cooke began a series of four adaptations of a handful of Perker's earliest stories. The first, THE HUNTER, follows career criminal Parker on a long, bloody trail toward revenge on a man who left him for dead and the return of some stolen monies he believes are rightfully his. Parker comes into conflict with "the Outfit", a nationwide crime syndicate, and by the story's end he's recovered his cash but made a very dangerous enemy of the Outfit.

SPRINGTIME GRAB BAG (IDW RETRO EDITION)

Last Fall, Comixology had a 50% off sale for their full IDW catalog. I'm not often big on digital comics outside of Marvel Unlimited, but I took advantage of this sale to check out a few things I've wanted to read for some time, as well as one series on which I did a spur-of-the-moment splurge. Somehow all of these items wound up being stories set in the past, hence the "retro" aspect of this review series.

Now, for the next four weeks beginning this Friday, I'll take a look at all those items in order of publication, beginning with the ROCKETEER comics of the eighties by Dave Stevens. The Rocketeer is a character I've had interest in for years, based as he is on the adventure serials of the thirties, but for whatever reason I've never actually checked him out. (I've never even seen the movie, despite its being released when I was twelve years old, pretty much the perfect age to get excited about it.)

Following the Rocketeer, we'll spend two weeks looking at Darwyn Cooke's four PARKER graphic novels, based on the character created by Donald E. Westlake and set in the sixties, when the novels were originally published. Much like the Rocketeer situation, I've never actually read anything by Cooke (though JUSTICE LEAGUE: NEW FRONTIER has been on my radar for several years now). Hopefully his adaptations of another writer's work will give me a decent idea of what he was all about.

Lastly is the splurge item -- HALF PAST DANGER, a mini-series by Stephen Mooney. I'd never heard of Mooney, but in stumbling across this series while perusing the IDW catalog, I decided I liked the artwork and I liked that, as with THE ROCKETEER, the series is influenced by adventure serials and is also set in the thirties.

So for the next few weeks we'll be heading back several decades to explore eras of Nazis, hard-boiled gangsters, and high adventure. And, once this is all done, it's entirely probable I'll stick with the retro theme for a few more months as part of this year's "Summer of..." project, so stay tuned.