Scott Gillis
Barry Gifford’s Perdita Durango
Avon Books/Neon Lit pbk
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)
Bob Callahan and Art Spiegelman’s Neon Lit project takes classics of "modern and postmodern crime fiction" to render as graphic novels. They did it first with a chilling, impressive take on Paul Auster’s City of Glass (beautifully illustrated by David Mazzucchelli), and follow it now with this adaptation of the novella 59 Degrees And Raining from Gifford’s Sailor’s Holiday, semi-sequel to the more famous Wild At Heart.
Perdita Durango - Tex-Mex femme fatale - hooks up with small-time voodoo-smuggler Romeo Dolorosa, getting the hell out of Texas with a pair of young hostages and a shitload of hot smack in the trunk. Sex, ritual, murder and surrealism (a night at White Sands amongst the Cold War detritus). Everything just has to end in violence.
Few writers are as unselfconsciously visual as Gifford. In his pared, bare boned prose are living images of sun-blanched deserts and rain-soaked bayou; of a fetid and festering New Orleans; of the bruised faces and livid-in skins of the careworn denizens. David Lynch hinted at such in his film of Wild, but only in the hallucinatory city scenes did he really tap into such a deep black vein.
Scott Gillis’s graphic novel is little surprise then. Eschewing pencil and Rotring, he uses scratchboards, finding in this most demanding of media something of the pure, intravenous Gifford. Anchored in a recognisable present, it’s on the fringes, on the edges of what he draws that the quintessence of the book lurks. There is an exaggeration to everything, a slight grotesque about the eyes, in the curl of the lip. His best stuff - the sheriff, Dolorosa, an astonishing portrait of Richard Nixon - is like Joe Coleman on Prozac. Perdita Durango captures the author’s scorched-Gothic, the timelessness that roots his best work somewhere between the 50s and now. His free-range plotting is custom built for the medium.
The book is backed by a brief (too brief) interview with Gifford himself, wherein he checks his own debt to Peckinpah (especially that sultry, nihilistic Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia), and discusses Alex De La Iglesia’s plans to shoot Almodovar-regular Victoria Abril as Durango in a proposed feature. What there is of it is good clobber, but no one can be accused of overabundance.
Two books in and Neon Lit is already showing itself a brave and distinctive imprint. An adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s Night-mare Alley, drawn by Spain Rodriguez, is planned for later this year, and if the panels pre-viewed in here are to be believed, it’s worth the wait. Now, if only they’d turn their collective gaze to Gifford’s astounding Arise and Walk.