Street Angel
Issues 1 & 2
W: Brian Maruca
A: Jim Rugg
B/W, 24 pages, $2.95 each
Aweful Books/Slave Labor Graphics
When it comes to talking about Street Angel, I guess I’m “their grandma,” because “everybody” is already taken. You can’t swing a dead cat around the comics blogosphere without hitting a writer who’s praised the book to high heaven, or indeed hosted some sort of contest-cum-outreach-program to draw more attention to this unassuming black-and-white adventure comic. My expectations for the book, as you might therefore guess, were pretty high. I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was a little disappointed, but I do think that’s less the fault of the book, which on its own terms is a success, and more the fault of the folks going on and on about it like it’s the greatest thing to happen to comics since sliced bread. (Has sliced bread ever happened to comics? I guess if you count Stray Toasters.)
The key to Street Angel’s success is its intelligent and slightly subversive premise. In the near future, the urban everycity known as Wilkesborough is beset by every schlocky genre convention known to man–mad scientists, hordes of ninjas, time-traveling conquistadores-slash-pirates, hard-luck astronauts, and so forth. The only thing keeping the town from slipping into complete chaos and destruction is a young gutterpunk code-named Street Angel, a fourteen-year-old skateboarder with the most destructive martial-arts capabilities this side of The Bride.
Indeed, the overall tone is not unlike an even more blatantly comedic remake of Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga. The giddy kitchen-sink blend of beloved B-movie (in this case, B-comics) conventions is there, as is the beautiful heroine who’s equal parts deadly and deadpan, and can navigate the disparate genres clashing around her with laugh-inducing aplomb. Also similar is the fact that, as was the case with Tarantino and The Bride, writer Maruca and artist Rugg mercifully refuse to have Street Angel parade around in her underwear.
Yet another point in common is the way that the Street Angel creators play with the actual formal stuff of comics-making. The back covers of each issue, for example, are dead-on sendups of well-known cartoonists’ ouevres–Issue One parodies the Lee/Silvestri/Turner Image school, right down to the thong straps peaking ou from the suddenly buxom Street Angel’s cargo pants, while Issue Two elicits a reaction along the lines of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Clowes or Tomine!” Sound effects often have their constituent letters knocked around the room by the very action they’re supposed to depict. The series’ funniest moment thus far takes place when Street Angel faces down a platoon of the evil geologist (a pretty hilarious concept on its own, no?) Dr. Pangea’s ninjas, only to have apparently dispatched them all Kill-Bill-House-Of-Blue-Leaves-style by the very next panel. “No, dear reader, you didn’t skip a page,” proclaims a caption. “Street Angel wiped out all of Pangea’s hench-ninja in the time it took you to turn the page.” (Dr. Pangea’s name itself comes into play in a similar fashion earlier in the issue, as characters wonder which came first, the moniker or the scientist’s obsession with reuniting the world’s land masses. This isn’t the kind of nature-or-nurture debate you had in college.)
The subversive element, though, stems not from the parodies of comic-book conventions, but from the position of Street Angel in the city she’s forced time and again to save. Beneath all the goofy, over-the-top ninja basketball games and Inca pimp gods is a book whose heroine is a homeless child with filthy hair and body odor. In the hands of some writers this might be little more than a conceit, a half-hearted stab at that ol’ Dickensian-urchin appeal, but Maruca is smart enough to drive the point home at the very end of each adventure, sticking a finger in Street Angel’s rollicking successes. Street Angel rescues the Mayor’s daughter, who subsequently and ruthlessly berates her savior’s hygiene; Street Angel persuades the Incan god Inti to send Hernando Cortez and his band of warriors back to their own time, and is subsequently propositioned by Inti to join his stable of prostitutes. (“Virgins are especially valuable. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Shades of Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver, or R. Kelly in real life.) It’s not often you see genuine socioeconomic commentary in rock’em-sock’em superhero parodies.
The art, too, is strong. Rugg is an appealing draftsman whose work will likely bring to mind Paul Pope, especially given the similarities between Street Angel and Pope’s cutie-pie adventure stories in THB. But to the stylish, blobby inkings of a Pope or a Farel Dalrymple, Rugg brings minimalist lessons learned from Adrian Tomine, and the occasional hint of the muscular caricature of Dean Haspiel. It’s a style that does very, very right by itself, able to convey kinetic action without overwhelming and altcomix steez without bogging down. When Rugg leaves something out, you know it’s by choice (and by the right choice) rather than by inability.
So why was I disappointed? Maybe this is just something I privilege, even in my gonzo action comedies, but I need character in my comics. As I’ve discussed, Street Angel herself has a great deal of potential, but no other characters are similarly fleshed out or based on similarly rich observations of the interplay between genre and personality. It’s fun to watch ninjas and Spanish pirates and Irish astronauts and skateboarding assassins duke it out, but not so much fun that I can ignore the fact that the outcome is essentially meaningless. And I’m not even saying that Street Angel has to suddenly evolve into Palomar–books like Paul Grist’s unbelievably enjoyable Jack Staff prove that seat-of-your-pants black-and-white indie superhero romps can be rich in compelling, even relatable characters. Other supercompressed comics have acheived similar results, including Grant Morrison’s Seaguy and (the granddaddies of them all) Jack Kirby’s Fourth World books. Heck, even the “action for action’s sake” monster meanderings of Mat Brinkman’s Teratoid Heights convey a human reality behind the wordless monsters therein. To be fair, we’re only two issues into the Street Angel series, but that’s certainly a direction I hope it goes down–the book would undoubtedly improve as a result.
So you’re unlikely to coax one of those “If you’re taking a dump right now, don’t even finish wiping–RUN OUT AND BY THIS BOOK WITH YOUR PANTS AROUND YOUR ANKLES IF YOU HAVE TO”-type hyperbolic statements about Street Angel out of me. But it’s a fine, fun book, and one with a great deal of promise should Maruca and Rugg harness the intelligence and imagination they bring to making us laugh at it and use it to make us laugh with it instead.