Bob Callahan (adaptation) and Scott Gillis (artist)
Avon Books/Neon Lit, paperback, 124 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)
Bob Callahan and Art Spiegelman’s Neon Lit project takes classics of ‘modern and post-modern 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 now follow it with this adaptation of the novella 59 Degrees And Raining from Barry 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-down, bare-boned prose images of sun-blanched deserts and rain-soaked bayou; of a fetid and festering New Orleans; of the bruised faces and lived-in skins of the careworn denizens. David Lynch hinted at such in his film of Wild at Heart, but only in the hallucinatory city scenes did he really tap into such a deep black vein.
Scott
Gillis eschews 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 grotesquery 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. What
Perdita Durango captures is 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 graphic novel medium.The book includes a brief (too brief) interview with Gifford himself, where he acknowledges 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 Almodóvar regular Victoria Abril as Durango in a proposed feature.
Two books in and Neon Lit is already showing itself to be a brave and distinctive imprint. An adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, drawn by Spain Rodriguez, is planned for later this year, and if the panels previewed 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.