FILTHY RICH

Brian Azzarello’s Richard “Junk” Junkin offers no redeeming quality whatsoever. Richard Stark’s Parker at least is adept enough to achieve his goals; Junk is not. He’s every bit the thug Parker is, but he isn’t good enough at it to triumph. He drinks too much to remain entirely in control of himself, something Parker would never do. And in Filthy Rich (196 5x8-inch pages, b/w; hardback, Vertigo, $19.95), Junk kills one person whose only sin, a dubious one considering the amoral inclinations of his would-be sexual partner, is to attempt sex with the woman Junk is hired to protect. Somehow that justifies Junk’s murderous attack. Junk tells us he “snapped,” the usual excuse justifying a crime of passion. But I’m not convinced.

With 100 Bullets and other such efforts, we’ve become accustomed to Azzarello’s metier — unsavory underground types, big and little crooks always out for themselves, all laced with authentic-sounding argot. Herein, he adds sex and debauchery to his formulaic greed and brutality. Junk works as a salesman at a car lot, but can’t seem to make a sale. So he drinks away his frustration, ranting to himself about how he is actually a superior salesman but is being victimized by an unfriendly world.

By the end of the book, he’s so tangled up in his career and sexual frustrations, his failures and his fears, that he murders one of the other salesmen and then the owner of the car lot. Junk’s only punishment here is that he is demoted by his new boss from body guard for his former boss’s daughter to chauffeur. And it isn’t the kind of punishment from which Junk learns anything: leering at Vicki through the rear-view mirror, he goes right on lusting and lurking, a menace waiting to turn a vicious dream into a nightmare. And that brings us back, full circle, to the book’s title, the double-meaning of which embraces both the wealthy bimbo and the unsavory Richard Junkin, who prefers that people call him either “Junk” or “Rich.”

Visualizing all of this is a Spanish artist named Victor Santos, who, the back cover tells us, is the “creator/writer/artist of the hit French series Young Ronin.” In Filthy Rich, he does a very bad imitation of Frank Miller in the Sin City books. The heavy black shadows in Santos’ pictures do not model characters as they do in Miller’s work: they distort and confuse. Moreover, to compound the clumsiness, Santos deploys mannerisms that result in various manifestations of deformed anatomy. Except for the women in the tale. But their identical babydoll faces make them indistinguishable one from the other.

Unlike in Azzarello’s 100 Bullets, which was rendered by a master craftsman, Eduardo Risso, Filthy Rich offers nothing to please the eye by way of redeeming the tale from its wholly unsavory amoralities. Nothing attractive in either picture or story. In 100 Bullets, there were wrongs to be righted; here, there is only a whining self-indulgence that imagines wrongs where none exist.