Hench
W: Adam Beechen
A: Manny Bello
80 pages, b/w, $12.95
ISBN: 1932051171
There’s hardly a vein left in the big superhero-comics motherlode that hasn’t been mined to near depletion. Neo-traditionalism, mad ideas, revisionism, retro, decompression, superheroes-plus (as in “plus crime/romance/sci-fi/what have you”): To quote the Barenaked Ladies, and God knows I try not to make that a habit, it’s all been done. You’re forgiven, then, if you greet Hench, the umpteenth iteration of “a realistic take on superheroes” to come down the pike, with something less than enthusiasm.
You are not forgiven, however, if you let that prevent you from giving the book a try. You’ll find your forebearance amply rewarded. In Hench’s slim 80 pages writer Adam Beechen establishes himself as a bona fide talent: a writer with a firm grasp on the interplay between the demands of character and plot, a command of genre convetions solid enough to make his undermining of same come across not as cheap shots but as smarts, and an ability to walk the well-worn paths of realistic superheroes and street-level crime tales without a stumble into cliche.
Hench is told mainly in flashback, as Mike, our protagonist, holds a gun to the head of a bound and incapacitated superhero named the Still of the Night. Mike is a career criminal, and his speciality is “henching,” serving as manpower, muscle, and cannon fodder for the various, nefarious supervillains that populate the world of the book. Slowly he tells the story of the choices he made–and the choices made for him–that brought him to this pass, a pivotal moment during which he must choose between becoming a murderer or, quite possibly, becoming the victim of one at the hands of the terrifying hero at his feet.
The story would be little more than a case of deja vu–Rehashtro City, if you will–if it weren’t for Beechen’s skill in depicting the emotional logic of Mike’s downward trajectory from football phenom to three-time loser. Beechen realizes that the presence of flying, bulletproof people who fight or commit crime is not a “get out of a semblance of normal human behavior free” card for a writer. As written by Beechen, Mike gets involved in supercrime for that most quotidian of reasons–money–but this is just a small part of his motivation for keeping at it. Right from the get-go he’s honest with himself about the odds for success in this field: As Randy, the ex-footballer friend who gets him involved in the life, puts it in one of their initial conversations on the topic, “Figure two out of every three jobs, you’re either going to jail or you’re going to the hospital and then to jail.” What makes Mike an ideal henchman isn’t just the poverty that leads so many to a life of crime, but an unextinguishable desire to be told what to do and to do it. Even when he’s helping to plot the overthrow of the U.S. government or risking capture at the hands of an alien crimefighter, Mike’s a linebacker at heart. The coaches may change, but as we see time and time again as Mike immerses himself in a particular supervillain’s world (the neo-fascist Shadow Army, the occultist Hellbent, the masochistic Pain Freak, and so on) only to do his time and forget about them afterwards, the coaches don’t matter. It’s getting back in the game that counts.
By the end of Mike’s story, he’s taking increasingly dangerous, borderline-suicidal jobs, with criminals like the radioactive Half-Life and the dangerously unhinged Pencil Neck. He’s become one of those people who say things like “I could do a five year bid standing on my head” and mean it. He’s lost his family (though, sadly for all involved, not his attachment to them), and he’s all but lost his ability to picture a better way of living for himself. If this sounds familiar to you from some of the better crime films you’ve seen, it probably should. The superhero trappings give Hench a selling point, but like all good superhero stories, it’s the truth behind the capes that counts. Hench has it.
That’s not to say that there’s not a single misstep in the book. The climax of the book centers on Mike’s decision as to what to do with the Still of the Night, who it turns out is part of that breed of “heroes” who’s as crazy and violent as the villains he fights. As the copy on the back of the book proclaims: “Heroes. Villains. The line between them has never been thinner.” Unfortunately, outside of the confines of the world of superhero fetishists (and yes, I’ll count myself in that number), I’m just not sure this is a particularly useful point, or an incisive glimpse at some deeper human truth. It doesn’t take too much insight to point out that a gibbering sociopath who dresses up in costume and beats the crap out of people every night may, in fact, be a not terribly heroic individual. “We’re not so different, you and I,” the villain always says to the antihero. “No duh,” I say to them both.
And then there’s the art. I suppose Ken Lowery is right: Manny Bello’s storytelling is always clear. Moreover, there are occasional visuals–the weird spirals and circles that comprise Half-Life, for example, or Mike’s refreshingly idiosyncratic appearance–that impress the reader. But overall one can’t escape the feeling that Bello is that guy in your algebra class who draws those really awesome pictures. Back in algebra class they were indeed really awesome, but the distance between algebra class and becoming a published comics artist must be paved with more growth than Bello has undergone. The art often looks hurried and unfinished, laced throughout with the kind of shortcuts that should get beaten out of artists at their very first portfolio review. There’s more to crosshatching than drawing a few rows of Xs, for example, and there’s more to drawing buildings (and cars, and chains, and guns–especially the gun that’s central to the entire story, for Pete’s sake!) than taking a ruler and drawing some rectangles. Finally, the conceit of reproducing famous stand-alone images from the ouevres of the great superhero comics of yore is amusing, but Bello lacks both the skill to depict these homages with enough accuracy to impress and the imagination to subert them in a compelling fashion. In the final analysis, seeing facsimiles of the poses and pin-ups of Kirby, Ditko, Romita, Steranko et al simply makes one pine for the originals. (In much the same way, the relatively hefty pricetag–thirteen bucks for 80 black-and-white pages–makes one pine for a manga digest, where you can get three times the page count for three bucks cheaper.)
But for fans of superhero stories who are looking not for something different–that’s next to impossible to find–but for something that distinguishes itself, Hench is a discovery. Reading it, you know that it won’t be long before the Big Two are beating a path toward this talented writer’s door. We can only hope that he can tell other kinds of stories with the deftness and confidence he brought to this one.