Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Sean Phillips
Publisher: Image Comics
New York City, 1939: ageing writer Max Winters is barely eking out a living writing Western stories for the dwindling pulp markets, spinning two-fisted tales of the Red River Kid for an appreciative but declining audience.
Beaten and robbed one evening, Max suffers a heart attack and realises with grim stoicism that he doesn’t have much time to make his suburban retirement with his live-in girlfriend, Rosa, a reality. He resolves to speed things along with a little armed robbery, which he certainly has the chops for: his Western tales are based on his own 19th century exploits, albeit shorn of ugliness and spruced up for the reading public. However, a figure from his past in the form of former Pinkerton Agent Jeremiah Goldman, interrupts his plan with a proposition: instead of knocking off the armoured car he’s been eyeing, why not put the gun on the German American Bund, getting rich and putting the boot into the Nazis at the same time?
Writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips have been at this downbeat noir thing for a while now, most notably in their Criminal anthology series, and fans of their work will know what to expect here: spares dialogue and linework delineating a hardened, morally compromised, but sympathetic central character, some real scumbags arrayed against him (here ranging from Max’s unsympathetic and avaricious editor to honest-to-God American Nazis), a plot reversal or two, and splashes of hard-hitting violence. All are present and correct in Pulp, this time with a bot of Old west flavour for good measure.
Here’s the thing: when your tag line is “Ageing Western gunslinger takes on Nazis”, I’m probably going to show up – that sort of thing sings to me. Make your hero a struggling writer, and that’s just icing on the cake – my points of identification are clear. I can’t be the only one, though, so if this sounds like your jam, it most assuredly is – fans of Westerns, noir, and the odd overlap between the genres are in for a treat.
It’s also a very timely work for a period piece, with Max and Jeremiah timing their heist to coincide with a Nazi rally that is sure to attract protesters and violence – anyone keeping even half an eye on the world will find resonances that were already present when Brubaker and Philips were actually working on the book, and have only become more apparent as this tumultuous year marches on. If you read your funny books for escapism, this might not be the one for you – it would take an active effort not to see the parallels between the threat of fascism presented in the book as a matter of historical record, and our own march towards authoritarianism and the fight against it.
The only real caveat is that this is very much a short story, not a novel. Brubaker takes space to lay out his characters and situation, and while he doesn’t scrimp on the action or the atmosphere, this is a one and done. Like a good pulp novel it gets in and out with brisk efficiency which is, both in this particular case and in terms of this creative team’s overall body of work, very much on brand.
