Night People #1 is a fever dream of a crime story. Honestly, you’re better off just sitting back and enjoying the ride instead of trying to piece together every plot detail and character relationship. It’s definitely fitting that this comic is an adaptation of a 1992 collection of short stories by Barry Gifford, who wrote the novel that the David Lynch film Wild at Heart is based on as well as penning the screenplay for Lost Highway. Writer/adapter Chris Condon, artist Brian Level, and colorist Ronda Pattison bring the blood, guts, and surreality of two religiously motivated man-killing women named Betty and Cutie painting New Orleans red as well as the hapless men, who get in their way and even try to stop them. Some of the side stories like dogs mauling each other in the woods don’t connect to the main narrative except to dose up the violence, but there are some really beautiful moments of poetic justice and violence.
Level’s art and Pattison’s colors capture the small moments that end up exploding into bigger moments of violence in Night People #1. It starts on page one when we see Betty and Cutie’s first victims with Brian Level using the banality of a janitor scratching his hands on a broom before he and the police see some beheaded corpses that end up haunting Douglas’ dreams as he’s hunting down the murderers for some reason or another. This continues later to the more prominent character Rollo Lamar, a lawyer, who crosses paths with Betty and Cutie and rubs what looks like a surgery scar on his chest. This shows vulnerability, but maybe also that he’s a good person as he gets a favorable life insurance settlement for a young woman and her child. However, in this kind of story, this woman has “murderer” written all over her.
From a bird’s eye view, Night People #1 explores the noir fiction trope of femme fatale with more of an emphasis on the fatale and not the femme so much. There’s not a lot of seduction just a lot of guns being pulled and woman on man violence like when Douglas gets smothered in a sexual encounter after a frankly weird day of having hallucinations about headless corpses and weird conversations about now and urination. Honestly, he’s a good riddance as a character because he came across like a Wish.com version of Matthew McConaughey’s character in True Detective and adds to the male victim/female killer through-line of the issue as Betty and Cutie get off scot-free in a literally explosive finale.
Night People is nothing like its former hardboiled Oni Press comrade-in-arms Stumptown with Chris Condon, Brian Level, and Ronda Pattison serving up a more askew crime story with fucked up gender politics, colorful nonsequitur dialogue (Comparing Betty and Cutie to anthropomorphic beings from Greek mythology, a radio news bulletin about frozen kangaroo tails), and big-time carnage. I’m not 100% sold on the series, but wouldn’t mind picking up issue 2 and seeing Lamar’s character development after his near-death experience, or seeing what religious motivation those two freaks Betty and Cutie have for their next misandric killing spree.
Story: Chris Condon Art: Brian Level
Colors: Ronda Pattison Letters: Shawn Lee
Story: 7.0 Art: 8.3 Overall: 7.6 Recommendation: Read
Oni Press provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review
Source: Graphic Policy
