Writer: Justin Jordan
Artist: Matteo Scalera
Publisher: Image
Release Date: December 11, 2013
Filthy, bleak, and unapologetically violent, Dead Body Road joins the ascending niche of cowboy noir that has grown haphazardly into the pop culture landscape within the past few decades. While the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone have always rested a few branches away from hardboiled crime in the genre family tree, Unforgiven, No Country For Old Men, and Breaking Bad permanently fused the two styles together beyond recognition. Blood-stained sand, aged leather, and sweat stains have all but replaced concrete jungles, pin-striped suits, and spilled martinis as the backdrop for modern crime entertainment. Yippie ki yay.
Dead Body Road isn’t particularly concerned with hiding its lineage. This debut issue opens with the grisly aftermath of a shootout between the police and bank robbers decked out in Walter White gas masks. The widower of a fallen policewoman embraces his inner Charles Bronson and vows vengeance. The narrative also features a soft-spoken torture artist named Fletcher Cobb who might have strayed from one of Cormac McCarthy’s notebooks. Even artist Matteo Scalera’s rugged, sand-blasted pages recall R.M. Guera and Jock’s work on Scalped, which probably bears the most influence on this book. It’s all incredibly familiar, if superficially handsome.
Noir only requires one rule to be noir, though: all characters must consistently make terrible decisions. Irreparable decisions. Decisions that tend to be solved through cruelty and disorder. At its most basic, noir is the myth of the zero sum game. At its best, noir is modern Shakespearean tragedy where a good writer bonds a flawed character to an audience, only to strip him or her from reality in the most violent way possible.
