Cross Bronx #1
Written by Ivan Brandon
Art by Michael Avon Oeming
Crime comics are hardly a dime a dozen nowadays. Good crime comics are even harder to find, with only the excellent 100 Bullets really standing out from the (rather thin) crowd. But here comes Mike ‘Powers‘ Oeming with his fancy-pants art pictures and a snazzy script and it’s like the whole ‘superheroes dominate the mainstream’ thing just didn’t happen. True, there are elements of the supernatural here, but they aren’t the main focus of the story, they’re just a device used to further the tension and drive the plot along. In much the same way that Powers isn’t about superheroes or Ex Machina isn’t about politics, this is a book that seems to be about one thing (in this case crime), but is actually about something else entirely.
Cross Bronx feels like a 90’s buddy cop movie, but looks like an inky black urban thriller. The basic premise is that in the city depicted, a crime is committed against a well known gang of criminals- the Reyes. And not just any crime, but a mass murder that leaves a stack of mutilated bodies three feet high and rising. The heavy black tones fill the streets with ominous shadows that lurk and wait for their moment to pounce, drenching the characters in a darkness they can never escape from. Everything is caught in shadow, every person could be hiding a weapon, their movements and angles accentuated by the darkness surrounding them. Often characters are totally in the dark, with their surroundings only barely illuminated, showing us that this is a city of the night, where everything appears sinister and threatening. And from this first issue, our first impressions would be correct; everything is a threat.
Language between characters is just what you‘d expect from a gritty urban crime book with short, clipped sentences, police humour flowing off the page like so much spilt claret, excessive profanity etc. Everything a new book needs to grip its potential audience by the shoulders and hold them hostage until the end of the ride. But that’s no bad thing, the dialogue is believable and the interplay between characters is both naturalistic and filled with pregnant pauses. Something is clearly bubbling beneath the surface here, something that’s keeping at least one of the two detectives assigned to this case from communicating with anyone around him- not his partner, not his only lead and certainly not his wife. Communication is definitely one of the main themes here; how can a Detective, a man who follows clues and connects the information he discovers into recognisable patterns, continue to exist when he can no longer trust his own eyes and brain to tell him the truth. If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?
As expected, the art is Oeming at his best, taking all of the skills he’s honed from years of drawing Powers and adding a few new layers of depth and shade to create a brutal world of broken shoulder blades and mangled corpses. He’s got a very distinctive style, it’s instantly recognisable and only very rarely emulated. The thick outlines on the character designs are reminiscent of early 90’s cartoons and have a very ‘animated’ feel to them, yet the situations and personalities of the characters are anything but Saturday morning TV friendly. Immediately the readers brain is lulled into a false sense of security by the art- the frames are full of very ‘cartoony’ characters, but that only enhances the impact of the horrific violence when it finally hits. A more photo-realistic approach isn’t as effective at securing this reaction because the violence or brutality can never equal the images that we see on the news or in the newspapers. Because all of the art is heavily styilised, the shock is greater and the violence seems much more profound. This of course, is intentional and essential for this kind of book- for years police procedural dramas have enthralled audiences in many different media, and readers/viewers have come to expect explicit sex/violence and language from their cop shows. All of these things are thoroughly embedded in the genre, and at the very least need to be addressed within the telling of the story. Cross Bronx does it well. There are few surprises in the way the characters speak, but it’s interesting to note the silences that occur between the people who (you assume) are meant to be close to each other.
Hopefully the story will continue its interesting take on crime fiction, following through on the supernatural elements without resorting to a dominance of out-of-genre plot-tropes designed to keep an audience guessing rather than moving the story along. This first issue is smart, well thought out and carefully structured, with great art and a good, solid script. If this initial foray into the world of the ‘bronx is an indication of how the series will progress, then I’ll definitely be around to see it grow into a mature and interesting detective comic.
Adam is the Manager of the Travelling Man Comic Book and Hobby Games Store in Leeds, UK. He’s a self-confessed über-fanboy and loves nothing more than chatting about the obvious superiority of the old-skool JSA over “Those damn glory-hogging kids, the Justice League”. He’s also a massive fan of small press indie comics, and loves reading new and exciting books that haven’t had all of the soul sucked out of them by the mainstream (yet). He also over-uses parentheses and hyphens, but likes the attention it gets him.