The Score: A Graphic Novel

(I'm putting the review and reading dates of entire series under my fave, The Score which is the third book out of four (would've been more but Cooke tragically died). I don't wanna add an entry for every single volume in a multi-volume comics set that took me shorter time to read than one prose novel. Not sure how to best go about that problem going forward so Bookwyrm advice welcome.)

Wow, what a masterpiece this is. You know how you read something from the 1960s and it's like 70% tinged with sixties and 30% is just normal universal stuff? ("Moonlight and love songs never out of date. Hearts full of passion, jealousy, and hate".) But when you read something like this which is a masterfully executed pastiche of sixties aesthetics, you're getting a lot more than 70%. There's this one image in the second book (The Outfit), an exterior shot of an apartment over a garage that I just wanna mainline. I wanna live there. I love the stair, the wall texture, the dormer windows plural, the location in the middle of a bunch of trees far from any road, and the brush and wash fashion-magazine–style rendering.

I loved reading these four books, what a treat. (CW: buckle up for heavy helpings of retro misogyny before you head in because there's gonna be a lot of that.) The three first books are almost equally good and it's by a hair that I'm gonna choose The Score as my fave. Again, this series is Cooke's masterpiece. My usual issues with him is that he's maybe the best artist who ever lived if we're talking about each individual frame. I mean maybe not some of his fill-in work on X-Statix or other earlier stuff but this, peak Cooke with a supportive editor who buys into the sixties fashion mag schtick? He's up there with my other faves like Xaime or Ami Uozumi. Maybe even number one. But panel-to-panel trying to tell an actual story? That's where he sometimes has fallen short, extremely disproportionately so given how good the dialogue and again the draftsmanship is. And for the first two books in this series (by second book I mean The Outfit; ignore The Man with a Getaway Face, you don't have to get that one, because it's a strict subset of the comics pages in The Outfit) we get to see a Cooke with storytelling that works. The third book, The Score, has a few weird situations where you're not entirely sure of the lay of the land (like how does the weird truck ramp relate to the rest of the town?) but that's very much ameliorated by a few schematic gimmicks like huge town map spreads.

So it's heartbreaking that the last book, The Slayland, both the main story and the bonus adaptation of The Seventh, are confusingly told messes. The source material for Slayland isn't very good either—all of these graphic novels are adaptations of prose novels by Richard Stark, and Slayland kinda sucks. It's cool that Stark tried a new gimmick, I'm just not into seeing the happiest place on Earth become a slasher flick.