When you just finish reading a good to excellent comic, and you sit down to write about it, or tell a friend about it, it is very easy to get overtaken by the spirit of hyperbole.  Sometimes you regret getting carried away by the emotion of a book.  And sometimes, you look back a few weeks later, and think “Yea, I’m not enjoying Matt Fraction’s run on Uncanny X-Men, but it’s not like he came to my house, held a chainsaw to my face and raped my cat until I read it.  Yeesh.  I need to calm down.”  In that spirit, I read this prelude, calmly placed it on my bed, made myself dinner and watched a television show that I wasn’t interested in.  It’s been a half hour.  And I still think that Darwyn Cooke’s take on Richard Stark’s Parker books is one of the best things to happen in the serial graphic novel medium since DC started releasing Sandman collections.

While I’d be very sad if Darwyn Cooke stopped doing comics altogether to focus on Richard Stark’s catalog, I feel that it would be worth it.  This prelude to his second book The Outfit is every bit as fantasticri as The Hunter.  Not a panel is wasted in this book.You’ll get a two solid pages absolutely plastered with dialog and narration, and it will be followed by a completely tense word free page of action.  I found myself nodding in appreciation at every page turn.

I really appreciate that, in an era of comics where we see gruesome entrails, and characters being raped while someone cuts off their head, Darwyn Cooke can just show a man confidently holding a gun in the distance, write “bang”, and we know that the person on the other end of that gun is fucken dead.  Showing the corpse or the blood spatter is entirely unnecessary when your storytelling is this solid.

I already pre-ordered The Outfit for this October.  This prelude has me thinking I should pre-order a bunch for friends, as well.