Crime Does Not Pay and Two Dead Authors

Steven Grant pays tribute to the end of Azzarello & Risso's 100 Bullets while ruminating about the crime genre and why it'll never catch on with the American comics readers. Excerpts:

"Crime stories, on the other hand, are about losers.

Stories about losers may seem counterintuitive to a lot of readers – like I said, American culture doesn't holds losers in much of anything but contempt – but for a writer they can be fascinating. It's simple math, really: winners win. That's what they do. That's what they must do. Doesn't matter what the story arc is, the story still has to end up in the same place. The hero wins.

Shift the focus to a loser, and the possibilities jump substantially."

And:

"Likewise, losers are usually simply more fun to write. Not only does similar storytelling math apply – the hero can't act villainously (at least not in some way that's not ultimately explicable in heroic terms, like Jack Bauer torturing a suspect for information necessary to stop a ticking nuke that will slaughter millions) but the criminal can act heroically – but no set characteristics are required, except those the writer sets himself. The absence of rules – it wasn't always so, but has evolved that way – fits the genre, and this inherent acceptance, demand even, of ambiguity invites the writer to conceive stories, characters and ethical issues in more fluid and unpredictable terms than is possible with superhero comics. (Not that superhero comics are incapable of it – there's no reason any genre should be – but the baggage that talent, publishers and readers bring to them prohibits it on any serious level, and where it has been achieved to any degree it has usually triggered a defensive backlash to reinforce the "purity" of superhero comics.) From the writer's standpoint, the crime story is simply more open to possibility.

From a reader's perspective it may not look that way, since crime stories, though frequently superheated and preposterous, usually involve the mundane world, as opposed to the supernatural elements that underpin genres like superheroes and horror, supernatural in this instance meaning "beyond nature" rather than "occult." From that outlook, the crime story, absent of vampires, androids, extraterrestrials and radioactive spiders, may seem less open to possibility. But that's a marketing issue. The other problem regarding an audience is the preponderance of "crime" stories, in the broadest application of the term, across other media like novels, film and television. Anyone wanting crime fiction has plenty of options. (Unlike anyone who wants a steady diet of superheroes or even horror, where options across media are considerably narrower.) Which means crime comics are under considerable stress to provide material not found elsewhere."

Read the entire thing here.

He also mentions that author J.G. Ballard passed away the previous week.

And I only found out the other day (via Ed Brubaker's column in his and Sean Phillips pulpy Incognito) that author Donald Westlake passed away last December 31. I'm a fan of his work, especially the Parker novels which he wrote under the name Richard Stark (which is just one of his various pseudonyms).