The Indy 100 #1

Title: shot callerz (also Shot Callerz)
Publisher: Oni Press
Creative Team: Gary Phillips (writer), Vrett Wieldele (artist), John Dranski (letterer), K. Seda (design), James Lucas Jones (editor), and Jamie S. Rich (editor-in-chief)
Date of Publication: May 2002
Issue: 1 of 4
Genre: Crime/Revenge Drama

Plot Overview:
Nea Garvin is a Strong Black Woman who gets shot in the back by her gangsta boyfriend, Philip, after a successful bank heist. After Philip foolishly leaves her alive, she plugs up her wounds as best she can and crawls out into the street. Just as she loses consciousness, she stumbles in front of a car. As Nea enters a coma, we find out the circumstances of the heist. The L.A. Clippers had just won the NBA championship. While everyone was in th street celebrating, Nea, Philip, and two accomplices rob a bank. Philip is overly brutal, but Nea ignores it. She berates herself for being so blind to Philip’s dark nature, but he was just so fine. She worries about her other two friends, Christian and Willie. As she regains consciousness, she hopes she is awakening from a nightmare.

Nope. She awakens to find two thugs, Freight and “Pooter,” waiting for her, so she pretends to still be unconscious. Freight has assigned Pooter to watch over Nea so he’ll know when she awakens. Freight wants his money and thinks Nea knows where Philip has gone. He makes it obvious he plans on killing her once he gets what he wants. And now that Nea has lost some weight from not eating “them pork chops like she used to,” he’s decided he wants more than just the information on Philip. A nurse comes to check on Nea and forces Freight and Pooter out. Freight has fed her a line that he and Nea are cousins. The nurse apparently believes him and promises to let him know when she awakes when he slips her his card and some cash.

Nea wakes up again later that night. A man in a body cast begins to spout off some exposition about her wounds. The bullets missed her kidneys, but she went into a coma from bloodloss. Thanks, bodycast guy. Pooter is still waiting outside the room, though, and storms in when he hears her moving around. Nea continues to play possum as Pooter (who is also called Wince, apparently) shakes her, but then wallops him with a bed pan. “Better than watching WWF SmackDown!” interjects bodycast guy. Nea knocks Pooter out and beguins taking his clothes. “This is better than ‘Real Sex’ on HBO!” interjects the creepy bodycast guy as Nea changes. Nea asks bodycast guy (his name’s Barry, by the way) to keep his mouth shut and then sneaks out of the hospital. She’s still feeling the effects of her wounds, but she manages to get Wince’s car and his money. Wince has just enough “ducats” to get Nea some greasy fast food and a no-tell motel room. Her vendetta has begun!

The scene then changes to a plushly appointed apartment where Freight chews out Wince and Pooter (oh, they were different characters, ok) over letting Nea escape while an anonymous blond gives him a blow job. OMG, this comic is so raw. Wince swears they’ll find Nea again and says he will kick her in the head with his size 11 shoes when he does. Nea, meanwhile, has picked up a pathetically twerpy white guy in a bar. She brings him upstairs where he gets ready to get busy. While his pants are down, Nea pulls a knife on him and robs him. She knows Marv The White Guy won’t report her because then he would have to explain this situation to his wife and kids. But, out of the goodness of her heart, she’ll just take his ATM card and pin number. She’ll withdraw the limit once and he can report it lost in the morning. Marv The Pathetically White Guy blithely goes along with it.

Nea, sporting some new threads, stops by a contact of hers named Creedmore, who is tremendously fat. She peppers him with noirish one-liners before getting down to business. Nea passes him a few hundreds and asks him about Willie Cruz. Creedmore says Willie hasn’t been seen in a month, but Christian Smith, Willie and Nea’s token white friend, has been keeping himself busy. Nea gets the info from Creedmore, but as she leaves out the back, some of Philip’s goons come in the front. Nea’s next stop is a pawn shop where a woman she apparently knows sells her some “cold” weapons and a carjacking kit. Nea apparently pays for her purchases with more noirish one-liners.

Nea goes to a posh area of L.A. and jacks a posh car, dismissively tossing it’s Club out the window. It’s the one worthwhile thing Philip taught her. after that, we see the thugs who worked over Creedmore and finally find out where Nea is going. Apparently Willie has set up shop in Nogales. Nea is driving through California and gives the reader a history lesson. She ends up in Indio, a city primarily known for its dates (as in, the fruit). She fantasizes about dates a bit before walking into Christian’s office. Where Willie’s been tied up, worked over, and killed at Philip’s behest. As Nea examines the room, trying to figure out what happened, she finds that Willie’s last act was to point at an image of a horse on a child’s block.

Nea ditches her car and sets up in a hotel in Palm Springs. In her room, she sees a painting of a horse and jockey, which causes the clue from Willie to click in her mind. Meanwhile, the thugs who killed Willie and worked over Creedmore pull into the hotel’s parking lot. Also, a whore reports Nea’s whereabouts to a mysterious old pimp named Smooth. And a whore and a John have sex, apparently for ambiance. That’s all for this issue.

Highlights:
The book is enthusiastically praised by its editor, who professes a love for crime fiction. He admits to stealing away the book from other editors after reading some of Gary Phillips’ crime novels. He spends the whole letter area talking up the project. Even the editor-in-chief praises it in his missive at the end of the issue.

The art is excellent. It’s unpolished and stylized, but so is the story, so it works. Despite it’s liney, rushed appearance, it is never confusing or distracting. No, the confusion comes from the awkward scripting, which I will talk about next. But this scene of Nea jacking a car is rather well done.

Lowlights:
what the hell is going on in this story? I have little confidence in my plot review, as the plot jumps around oddly. Scenes break and change with little notice, leaving the reader scratching their head. We’ll be in a scene with Nea, but before it reaches its logical conclusion, we’ll be with some other barely defined supporting character. Then, pages later, we’ll finally find out how Nea’s scene ended second hand from a different (maybe?) character. This awkward plotting kills any momentum the book has and inspires the reader to put it down. It’s actually quite frustrating. Just as I start to care about Nea’s struggles, the plot is pulled out from under me and I’m stuck trying to figure out what just happened instead of focusing on the drama of Nea’s vengeance.

This confusion is not helped by the fact that most characters are completely interchangeable and impossible to tell apart. I mentioned my confusion over whether Wince and Pooter were different characters. Freight is a little more defined, but he only shows up twice and is directly called by name both times. Willie and Christian are also impossible to distinguish, despite the fact that only Willie appears. Nea walks into Christian’s place, calls Christian’s name, but then finds Willie dead? What? It doesn’t help that Willie is drawn almost as large as Creedmore, negating his one distinctive feature. And since the last we see of Creedmore, he’s about to be worked over, it seems like he’s dead. It took me multiple readings to even begin to understand who was who. In fact, only 4 characters are recognizable, and that’s only because they have one defining characteristic. Nea is the protagonist and the only female main character. Philip Tangiers, her ex-boyfriend, has a distinctive dreadlock-style haircut. Interestingly, the last two are throwaway characters. Barry, the white guy in the body cast, and Marv, the white guy Nea robs. Everyone else is practically interchangeable. I had to rely entirely on the dialog to figure out who was who. Another layer of annoyance that separates me from the story.

Who is this? Willie? Wince? Pooter? Waldo?

Perhaps the most ridiculous thing, however, is the dialog. It integrates a large amount of street slang, which makes sense in a story with this kind of a setting. Unfortunately, about 90% of it sounds completely ridiculous when you read it. It doesn’t sound natural at all. Part of this may be due to the inherent difficulty of writing a dialect believably (anyone who has tried to write or read someone with an Irish accent knows this pain all too well), but it often seems like the writer is doing it on purpose. The editor-in-chief does mention in his statement that shot callerz is supposed to be an homage to blaxploitation films, but if that’s the case, the language actually misses the point by taking itself too seriously. In the end, we get a mish-mash of street slang, noir cliches, and borderline stereotypical language. I’ll give you a little taste, taken from the very first page of the comic: “Ain’t that about nothin’? He played me like I was some stupid hood rat I swore I was never gonna become. But I let a fine body and a face that would make Taye Diggs jealous get next to me. Shit.” I think that about sums it up.

Enjoyment rating (out of 5): 2
Not bad, but certainly not good. This comic can’t decide whether it wants to be a serious crime drama or a campy noir/blaxploitation homage. The campy parts work ok, resulting in a few chuckles and a few nice scenes, but the serious parts and Nea’s “noir heroine” dialog fall flat. If I had paid the $2.99 cover price and not $0.22, I would be very displeased.

That’s one down, folks. The following reviews will all follow this format, more or less, so I hope you like it. Next up: KRUSADA