"It's the only way he can feel": 10 tidbits about the excellent Drive soundtrack

Drive is a film I initially dismissed as Faster: Caucasian Edition (the main characters in both Faster and Drive share the same minimalist name as the Ryan O'Neal character in Walter Hill's The Driver: "Driver"). I also kept thinking, "What's up with that hot-pink '80s font on the Drive posters and soundtrack album cover? Is this a Hill-style action film or a spinoff of Alice with Linda Lavin?" That was all before I discovered Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's artsy action flick--a European outsider's vision of L.A., much like John Boorman's surreal 1967 classic Point Blank--is one of the most finely crafted pieces of cinema in 2011.

Many critics and bloggers have been crazy about Drive, which Refn adapted from the 2005 James Sallis noir novel of the same name, ever since it earned at Cannes both a 15-minute standing ovation and a Best Director prize for Refn (I wonder what Parker, Taylor Hackford's upcoming adaptation of Donald E. Westlake's The Hunter, the same novel that Boorman made into Point Blank, would have been like under the direction of Refn, whose latest thriller has all the leanness and meanness of a Parker caper).

But to moviegoers who are neither critics nor film geeks who are well-versed in the cinematic and visuals-driven language of Hill, Boorman and Michael Mann, the offbeat and ultraviolent-when-you-least-expect-it Drive--which was influenced by the works of those three directors and many others, yet it doesn't feel derivative and hackneyed--is a love-it-or-hate-it film. It received a C- at CinemaScore, even though it features Albert Brooks in a surprisingly convincing villain role and stars Ryan Gosling in one of his most appealing roles, as an introverted Hollywood stuntman-by-day/getaway driver-by-night who's as contradictory a figure as Steve McQueen in Bullitt or Takeshi Kitano in Fireworks (buried under the laconic, calm and non-threatening-looking exteriors of Gosling, McQueen and Kitano are some really violent dudes) and is as mysterious and somehow beloved by kids as Alan Ladd in Shane.

The C- is most likely due to moviegoers who expected Drive to be what was known in the '90s as a "TBS Movie for Guys Who Like Movies" and were unprepared for a film that's a little less conventional than that and is "fearless about being corny," as Elvis Mitchell said about Drive while interviewing Refn on The Treatment. At the Drive matinee screening I attended, a group of teenage Latinas didn't understand the film or why Gosling's Driver barely spoke to his MacArthur Park neighbor/love interest Irene (Carey Mulligan) and felt it was their responsibility to let everyone in the theater know that they didn't understand--loudly. It resulted in a moviegoing experience that was so lousy--it's one of the lousiest I've ever had--I ranted about it on Twitter, but Drive is so intriguing not even the smug attention whores who snickered in the theater during every scene could taint my enjoyment of the film or its soundtrack.

Speaking of the Drive soundtrack, which consists of '80s-sounding but surprisingly recent Euro-synth tunes that Refn once described as "like Joy Division with a beat" and an ambient original score by Narc composer Cliff Martinez, both the songs and score are pitch-perfect for the film's decadent '80s Thief/To Live and Die in L.A. vibe and are totally addictive outside the context of the film. A few of the selections from the Drive soundtrack can be heard on A Fistful of Soundtracks, but if you're too impatient to wait to catch one of the Drive tracks on AFOS, the Lakeshore Records release, which is selling like gangbusters on iTunes, is worth downloading or picking up.

Here are 10 facts about the music of Drive:

1. In the film, Gosling's wheelman character likes to turn on the radio while waiting for his criminal accomplices to finish their heists. That character detail stemmed from the first time Gosling truly bonded with Refn. Gosling, who wanted to make a superhero movie and thought of Drive as his superhero project, hand-picked Refn to direct the film because he was a fan of the director's previous works, but as Gosling has noted in several interviews, he initially had a difficult time communicating with a standoffish, under-the-weather and high-on-flu-medicine Refn about how they should approach the project until...

"I turn on the radio to quiet the silence and REO Speedwagon's 'Can't Fight This Feeling' comes on," said Gosling, recalling to New York Times writer Dennis Lim his first car ride with Refn (whom Gosling would frequently chauffeur around SoCal because Refn doesn't drive and stopped working on getting his driver's license after failing his driving test eight times). "And I see [Refn] start to cry and he looks at me with tears in his eyes and he starts singing at the top of his lungs and hitting his knees, and he says, 'I know what this movie is, it's a movie about a guy who drives around listening to pop music because it's the only way he can feel.'"

The sounds of a 1985 high school prom bring out the waterworks in Refn? Wow. Remind me not to play Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is" around Refn or else someone's snot will start flowing.

2. On The Treatment, Refn told Mitchell, who likened Drive to a musical, that whenever he starts work on each of his films, he chooses a specific band or artist to constantly listen to as inspiration. During Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands, Refn put on Iron Maiden and then went with Neil Diamond for Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death and Pet Shop Boys for his 2008 cult favorite Bronson. "Music heightens emotions," said Refn to Mitchell. "It gives you images in your head." For Drive, Refn listened to Kraftwerk, hence the Euro-synthy songs and score.

3. Before Refn picked Martinez to score Drive, he approached Portland indie synth-pop producer and Italians Do It Better label co-founder Johnny Jewel about writing the score. In Bronson, Refn prominently featured "Digital Versicolor," a track by Jewel's band Glass Candy (one of a bunch of bands that include Jewel as a member). Jewel jumped at the opportunity to score Drive and completed three hours' worth of score music, but due to deadline issues and some miscommunication, Jewel's score ended up being unused. Jewel wasn't bitter over his Drive score cues getting rejected and is planning to release the unused material on his upcoming imaginary soundtrack project Symmetry.

4. To get inspiration while working on the score cues, Jewel and his Chromatics bandmate Adam Miller drew pictures of scenes from Drive. Jewel also got his musical ideas from posters he made of excerpted text from the novel version of Drive and phrases from the movie. He described his creative process to Box Office magazine, and the artwork that resulted from this process (like the above illustration of Drive femme fatale Christina Hendricks) can be glimpsed on the blog for Desire, one of two of Jewel's bands that get airplay in Drive:

One of the first things I did was I took the book and I highlighted all of the phrases, things like "last day," "sanctuary," all of these different phrases from the movie that stimulated my brain, and I'd print those words really big and put them on the wall. Or while I'm writing--this was sort of like a mantra--we were drawing pictures while watching the movie every day. Because everything I do is like going into this camp mode where we would cut ourselves off. I was watching the movie while taking a bath, I was watching the movie while eating, like every day. Because there was only so much time and I wanted to know the movie inside and out, and I can't be watching the movie while I'm actually writing. While I was actually trying to figure out melodies and things like that, I had to watch the movie as much as possible. We drew almost like every scene--there's like 150 of them--so we drew so much, and then I forgot about them and then stumbled across them a couple of weeks ago.

5. Jewel's 2007 instrumental "Tick of the Clock," performed by The Chromatics, is used during the magnificently directed sequence that opens the film and precedes the hot-pink Mistral font credits: Driver's tense and wordless cat-and-mouse game with the police through the avenues and alleyways of L.A. "Tick of the Clock" is 15 minutes long, so Jewel and Chromatics bandmate Nat Walker cut it down heavily for the film.

CHROMATICS / TICK OF THE CLOCK by ITALIANS DO IT BETTER

6. The other Jewel-produced track in Drive is "Under Your Spell," Desire's 2009 tune about romantic longing. It starts out as source music at the homecoming party that Irene throws for her recently freed ex-con husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) and morphs into non-diegetic music as Driver broods over the fact that Standard's return to Irene and their son Benicio (Kaden Leos) has now turned Driver into a third wheel, no pun intended.

DESIRE / UNDER YOUR SPELL by ITALIANS DO IT BETTER

7. French electro-house musician Kavinsky's 2010 track "Nightcall," Drive's hypnotic opening title theme, was recommended to Refn by Drive editor Mat Newman. The song previously appeared in The Lincoln Lawyer. (Martinez, Drive music supervisors Eric Craig and Brian McNelis and Drive costume designer Erin Benach, who built Driver's superhero-style white satin jacket with the Kenneth Anger-inspired scorpion logo on the back, all also worked on The Lincoln Lawyer.)

"Nightcall," which pairs up Kavinsky, a.k.a. Vincent Belorgey, with Lovefoxxx, a.k.a. Luísa Hanae Matsushita, lead singer of the Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy, was co-written and co-produced by Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Kavinsky, who's toured with Daft Punk and looks like he takes his fashion cues from Teen Wolf, has cited among his influences Giorgio Moroder, Ennio Morricone and '80s R&B bands that the French refer to in their language as "moccasin funk": Midnight Star, The Whispers and Shalamar.

Nightcall (feat. Lovefoxxx) by Kavinsky

8. Before he wrote scores for Steven Soderbergh films like The Limey and Contagion and provided an effective and low-key score for Drive, Martinez was a drummer for Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Dickies. (One of Martinez's earliest scoring credits was a second-season episode of the classic '80s show Pee-wee's Playhouse, which Danny Elfman and Mark Mothersbaugh--two other rock musicians-turned-film and TV composers--also wrote music for early on in their film and TV scoring careers.)

9. "A Real Hero" is the song that plays during Drive's L.A. River sequence. Before Standard re-enters the lives of Irene (whom Martinez's propulsive end title theme refers to as "Bride of Deluxe," a reference to "Where's the deluxe version?," a joke Irene made about Standard's first name when she first met him) and Benicio, Driver takes his neighbor and her son for a relaxing afternoon drive through the L.A. River, a site Driver is perhaps familiar with from his stunt driving shoots. The L.A. River was made famous by the racing sequence in Grease and car chases in Repo Man, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and countless other films, shows and music videos.

The most fairy tale-like of Drive's existing songs (Refn envisioned Drive as a fairy tale with Gosling as the knight and Mulligan as the maiden he sets out to rescue), "A Real Hero" is a 2009 collabo between French producer and remixer David Grellier, a.k.a. College, and the Toronto synth-pop duo Electric Youth (named after the Debbie Gibson album of the same name). The tune is reprised at the end of Drive. In a tweet about "A Real Hero," Brad O'Farrell, "starter of the Keyboard Cat meme," said, "Man I like how the 'theme song' of Drive only plays twice, and both times he really earns it."

The vocalist during "A Real Hero" is Electric Youth member Bronwyn Griffin, whose voice has been described by tracasseur.com as "one of the most beautiful in the world of blog electro, it fits so perfectly with [her musical partner Austin Garrick's] happy, bubbly sounds." Grellier, Griffin and Garrick are part of the Valerie Collective. According to the Guardian, the acts that make up this international collective all "blog, create lush, catchy synthpop and generally raise the act of homage to epic, fanatical proportions."

College feat. Electric Youth - A Real Hero [music from the Motion Picture, Drive] by Electric Youth (Official)

Here's another College/Electric Youth song. "She Never Came Back" wouldn't feel out of place in Drive:



10. Heard during the death of a key character, legendary Italian film composer Riz Ortolani's sorrowful "Oh My Love," which features vocals by Katyna Ranieri, is a song from a film that was as notorious for its extreme violence as Drive currently is, Farewell, Uncle Tom. "Either one of the most racist films ever made or a potent condemnation of racism, this 1971 feature from the directors of Mondo Cane is nothing if not brutal," wrote Philadelphia City Paper film critic Sam Adams in 2003, "with gruesome pseudo-documentary footage of slaves being beaten, raped, force-fed with metal funnels and about every other horror you could imagine (and some you hopefully can't)."

When the Italian-made docudrama about the history of American slavery was first shown in America in 1972, Roger Ebert was far less kind to the film than Adams was and found it to be too exploitative.

"Unfortunately, [Gualtiero] Jacopetti and [Franco] Prosperi have been able to find people willing to undergo the humiliation inflicted on them... most of the blacks in the film are apparently Africans forced by poverty and need to do these things for a few days' pitiful wages," wrote Ebert. "Make no mistake. This movie itself humiliates its actors in the way the slaves were humiliated 200 years ago... The fact that this film could find a booking in a legitimate motion-picture theater is depressing."

You might be repulsed by Jacopetti and Prosperi's Mondo movies, either because of their staged footage or the disturbing nature of much of that footage, or you might not find them repulsive, but there's no denying that Ortolani's music for them sounds gorgeous. Ortolani's lush 1962 Mondo Cane theme "Ti guarderò nel cuore," a.k.a. "More," became a frequently covered international hit.

The somber Farewell, Uncle Tom theme is an equally lush composition. It's also the only tune on the Drive soundtrack that's out of place. I skip it whenever I play the entire album because it disrupts the propulsive '80s groove established by "Nightcall," "Under Your Spell" and "A Real Hero" and maintained by Martinez's cues. "Oh My Love" is the speed bump in the otherwise smooth ride that is the Drive soundtrack.

The Limey: Unlike its washed-up characters, it stands the test of time

The last time I saw The Limey was on an Artisan Entertainment screener tape during its art-house run 10 years ago. Steven Soderbergh's superb follow-up to the beloved Out of Sight was one of many highlights of a great and still-unsurpassed movie year (1999), and after stumbling into the film on IFC the other night and stopping whatever I was writing on my computer to watch it for the second time, it still is a highlight of '99.

I noticed a few things in this second viewing. The hot gangster's moll (played by a pre-daytime TV Amelia Heinle) spends a lot of time getting wet during the movie; Lesley Ann Warren is one of the finest-looking untouched-by-plastic-surgery sixtysomething actresses; Bill Duke must have been hired to play the marshals' disabled boss in the Out of Sight spinoff Karen Sisco based on his now-classic reaction to Terence Stamp's long speech from his DEA office desk ("There's one thing I don't understand. The thing I don't understand is every motherfuckin' word you're saying."); and some of the themes in Cliff Martinez's eerie score appear to have been an homage to equally eerie scores from late '60s/early '70s thrillers like Klute and Point Blank (which The Limey is often compared to, and Soderbergh is such a fan of the John Boorman classic that he recorded a commentrak for it).

I've read about the Limey DVD's infamous Soderbergh/Lem Dobbs commentrak--in which Dobbs argued with Soderbergh about the changes the director made to his script--but never listened to it. Now I'm itching to hear the commentrak.

My year-long postings of past or long-buried writing continue with a piece I wrote about The Limey at the time of its release.

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The Limey
Artisan
Starring Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Lesley Ann Warren, Luis Guzman, Barry Newman, Joe Dallesandro, Nicky Katt, Amelia Heinle
Music by Cliff Martinez
Photographed by Ed Lachman
Written by Lem Dobbs
Directed by Steven Soderbergh

If Sarah Flack never gets an Oscar nomination for her ingenious editing of Steven Soderbergh's witty, melancholy revenge thriller/character study The Limey, then the members of the Academy ought to be taken out. The story of a British ex-con named Wilson (Terence Stamp) who tries to reconnect with his murdered daughter while searching the streets of L.A. for her killer, The Limey is told in a jigsaw-puzzle narrative style that shuffles past and present events. For instance, whenever Wilson discovers an important clue about his daughter's whereabouts before she was killed, the film cuts to a shot of a pensive, brooding Wilson, alone in a motel room or on an airplane. Are we watching him before he embarks on his journey through L.A. or are we seeing him on his way home to England, reflecting on his trip?

The nonlinear technique will befuddle some viewers, especially those expecting to see a "TBS Movie for Guys Who Like Movies." But it's a crucial--and inspired--device because it underscores how time makes very little sense to Stamp's title character, who, when the film opens, has just been released from a nine-year prison sentence that has messed with his concept of time, like it would do to any long-term inmate.

Wilson isn't the only character in The Limey who's disconnected from time. Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda) is a faded Hollywood record producer who never got over the end of the free-spirited '60s. This uneasy rider has gone to seed and turned to the drug trade to stay wealthy as he lures young starlets half his age with his hedonistic lifestyle and with stories about the '60s. One of these aspiring actresses is Wilson's daughter Jenny (Melissa George), who dated Valentine and lived with him before her death. Wilson's trail leads him to Valentine, but is Jenny's former lover really responsible for her tragic fate?


Stamp and Fonda are compelling as older, wearier versions of their '60s screen personas. Luis Guzman has an amusing and poignant supporting turn as a friend of Jenny's who assists Wilson on his manhunt, despite the language barrier between the two (the Angelenos' inability to understand Wilson's cockney slang is a running joke that fortunately isn't overused). Soderbergh calls The Limey "a very simple revenge film with a lot of '60s baggage." Although the plot may be a bit on the thin side, The Limey is anything but a simple revenge film. The characters are hardly the automatons of Charles Bronson shoot-'em-ups. Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs refuse to paint them in simplistic strokes. The seedy Valentine, sort of an underworld Humbert Humbert with his taste for younger women, may be the villain here, but like Humbert, he's more pathetic than malicious; the film empathizes with his yearning for his younger, less desperate days. It's Valentine's associates, volatile, snarky hitman Stacy (Nicky Katt) and his older partner Uncle John (Joe Dallesandro), who are more greedy and evil than Fonda's character. As for Wilson, he's a man of contradictions. He has regrets about the life he led before prison (cleverly depicted in flashbacks composed of footage taken from Stamp's 1967 film Poor Cow, in which he also played a criminal named Wilson), most of all because it severed his relationship with his daughter. Yet he finds himself reverting back to the criminal life that drove her away in order to find her killer, which leads to another explanation for the jigsaw-puzzle storytelling: it suits the story of a man who's a puzzle, even to himself.

The Hunter gets captured by the geeks: The books I picked up at Comic-Con, part 2

Previously: The Middleman: The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse, Adrenaline and Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain.


My rundown of the graphic novels and TPBs I bought at Comic-Con concludes with two recent projects from IDW, which quickly became the comics publisher whose releases I've been looking forward to the most because of its ambitious reprints and high-quality revivals of properties like Star Trek and Doctor Who.

I picked up Classic G.I. Joe Volume 1 at the IDW booth because I was looking for a comic that veteran Marvel and DC letterer (and friend and mentor to several of us Secret Identities creators) Janice Chiang worked on and could sign for me at Comic-Con, and the TPB happened to contain an issue lettered by Janice. She then brought me over to another former Marvel letterer, Rick Parker, to have him sign the TPB because his work appeared in the collection too.

I never was an avid reader of Marvel's G.I. Joe comics, although I bought some issues of the mothership and a couple of its spinoffs when I was a kid. I was more familiar with the Sunbow animated series, which hasn't exactly aged well. Even when I watched G.I. Joe and Transformers back-to-back after school, I thought the animation on both those Sunbow shows sucked. The constantly choppy character movements made the crappy made-for-TV Popeye shorts from the '60s look like Richard Williams cartoons. Because the Sunbow series was essentially a 29-minute toy commercial (subtract one minute for the "Knowing is half the battle" PSA, which was devoted to giving safety tips or warnings about creepy guys in white vans instead of selling toys), most of G.I. Joe's episodes were forgettable and silly, except for one: the Steve Gerber-penned "There's No Place Like Springfield," an eerie two-part ep about Jack Nicholson's Shipwreck's awakening from a seven-year coma that was inspired by The Prisoner (Shipwreck's home address at "Number Six Village Drive" was a shout-out to that famously surreal show). The downbeat tone of the ep and the images of Shipwreck's wife, daughter and friends melting into grey goo blew my mind when I was a kid and scarred other kid viewers for life.


The Marvel comics were intended to sell toys too, but the writing in those comics tended to be much better than the writing on the cartoon, thanks to regular scripter and G.I. Joe action figure dossier writer Larry Hama, a real American hero, especially to Secret Identities contributors who dug that an Asian American was at the helm of Marvel's finest-written toy-based title (also the first comic ever advertised on TV). The Vietnam vet-turned-comics scripter's military expertise added authenticity and grit to the comics and kept them more grounded than the cartoon, where nobody died, Star Wars-style lasers replaced bullets and Cobra was about as dangerous and menacing as Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz. That's why the late Gerber's despair-filled "Springfield" was such a stunner back in 1985--the cartoon ditched its usually campy tone for once, added some much-needed menace to Cobra and incorporated a storyline from the comics, the Joes' discovery of a Cobra base disguised as an idyllic, all-American suburb called Springfield.


The standout 1983 G.I. Joe issue that introduced Hama's Springfield--a town that's as rotten-at-the-core as Matt Groening's Springfield--is included in Classic G.I. Joe Volume 1, which collects the first 10 issues of the original 1982-1994 Marvel comic, most of them drawn by '70s Incredible Hulk artist Herb Trimpe in the classic '60s/'70s Marvel style. My tastes in espionage comics lean towards the more adult Queen & Country and Sleeper, so I found the dialogue in these early '80s G.I. Joe issues to be on the hokey side. Despite the hokey one-liners, as the Topless Robot blog noted last year, the original comic still kicks its cartoon counterpart's ass. Scarlett--the lone female Joe in these earlier issues, before Hasbro added Cover Girl and Lady Jaye to the cast--gets a bunch of thrilling take-charge moments in the 1983 issue that Janice lettered, a Mike Vosburg-drawn story in which Scarlett is assigned to protect a diplomat who's being targeted by Cobra (another highlight of the TPB, as well as one of the few issues in the collection that didn't involve either Hama or Trimpe).

I bet the old issues I read in Volume 1 even wallop the ass of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which hired Hama as a creative consultant. I have no plans to watch the movie because it looks terrible and overly CGI'd in the TV ads (this was a much more expensive Paramount movie than Star Trek, yet they couldn't afford to get some decent-looking CGI that looks like 2009 CGI instead of 2002 CGI?). Director Stephen Sommers seems to have gotten the '80s toy lines-turned-cartoons mixed up. Exosuits?! (Or as the movie calls them, "accelerator suits"?!) That's Centurions, not G.I. Joe. The Funny or Die parody was better cast than the movie itself. Henry Rollins would have been a more charismatic Duke than Channing Tatum, whose acting coach was apparently a 3 3/4-inch Duke action figure. And what the hell is the very blond Sienna Miller doing playing the very dark-featured Baroness (who's portrayed in the Funny or Die spoof by a far more convincing-looking Olivia Wilde), and why was Miller directed to give the Russian villainess an American accent? To me, Miller will always be Eddie Arlette's prissy and spoiled British flatmate.

Judging from the ads, the only performer in The Rise of Cobra who's perfectly cast is Star Trek's scene-stealing Orion babe Rachel Nichols as Scarlett. She looks like she walked straight out of the issue that Janice lettered, which at one point has a shorty robe-clad Scarlett making a daring high-wire escape from an upper-story hotel window with her crossbow. The statuesque ex-Alias season 5 regular appears as if she were born to perform a sequence like that.


Speaking of destiny, artist Darwyn Cooke--a fan of the artwork on the '60s/'70s G.I. Joe action figure packaging--was born to bring his minimalist style to the late Donald E. Westlake's equally minimalist 1962 crime novel The Hunter, a book so nice moviemakers have filmed it thrice, as the badass Lee Marvin revenge flick Point Blank, the Chow Yun-Fat actioner Full Contact and the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback (the only one of the three loose screen adaptations of The Hunter I haven't watched, and that's partly because composer Chris Boardman's ripoff of David Shire's Taking of Pelham One Two Three main title theme indicates how tired and derivative Payback must be).


For those who have never read Westlake's original novel or watched either Point Blank, Full Contact or Payback, the brutal tale follows a ruthless career thief's vendetta against his former partners-in-crime, who left him for dead and screwed him out of his share of a successful heist. The vendetta escalates into a one-man battle against the mob, a.k.a. the Organization ("The funnies call it the Syndicate. The goons and the hustlers call it the Outfit."), as the crook, known simply as Parker, kills his way through the Organization's hierarchy to get back his skrilla.


Under his Richard Stark pseudonym, Westlake wrote 24 novels featuring Parker--the original cold-blooded, unrepentant thief. Westlake's creation has clearly influenced so many similar thief characters in film and TV, particularly the protagonists in Michael Mann caper flicks like Thief. The climactic retribution that James Caan's self-made small businessman character unleashed against the control-freak boss who "owns the paper on his life" echoed Parker the similarly independent freelancer's confrontations with big business. Linda Fiorentino's Last Seduction antiheroine Bridget Gregory seemed to have inherited the Westlake character's amorality and relentlessness. Michael Westen, the blacklisted ex-spy and occasional safecracker in Burn Notice, inherited Parker's icy demeanor, professionalism and stubborn refusal to let a faceless, elusive corporation screw him over (in Michael's case, the shady character known only as "Management" and the nameless black ops organization that arranged to have Michael "burned"). Leverage co-creator John Rogers named Parker the possibly Asperger's-afflicted cat burglar chick after Westlake's equally antisocial thief. Parker has basically begat more offspring than Anthony Quinn.


Some readers have complained that Cooke's IDW adaptation of Westlake's first Parker story is overhyped. On what planet is this graphic novel overhyped? As a commenter on the Robot 6 blog noted, "In a world where Blackest Night is consuming 90% of the comics blogosphere's attention, this is overhyped?," but both Westlake's writing and Cooke's work have loyal cult followings, as evidenced by the slightly long line for Cooke's Hunter signing at the IDW booth--the only Comic-Con line I had the patience to stand in. I was lucky to nab a first-printing copy of The Hunter (wrapped in an exclusive Comic-Con dust jacket that I prefer over the regular white version of the jacket) before the hardcover novel sold out at its distribution level.


It's easy to see why The Hunter attracted a lengthy line that Friday, skyrocketed to #3 on the New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller List in its first week and is already on its way to a second printing. Cooke's spare, monochromatic and beautifully shaded artwork is extraordinary, whether it's visuals of sexy women or 1962 New York streetscapes. The DC: The New Frontier writer/illustrator told the L.A. Times that he intended his art in The Hunter to be as stripped-down as Westlake's prose, which was the crime author's experiment to see if he could tell a story without any emotional content and with an antihero who internalizes his emotions. The Cooke adaptation's first 16 pages are as coldly efficient as Parker himself. Cooke superbly establishes Parker's criminal skills and single-minded, amoral character without any dialogue. It's as ballsy an opening as the disorienting first few minutes of Point Blank.


I never read the original source material, but the 1967 John Boorman film wowed me when I first saw it in university a decade ago, despite a puzzling ending that was initially frustrating (SPOILER: Patrick Duffy emerges from a shower and says "it was all a dream"). The Hunter doesn't quite do for crime comics what Point Blank did for '60s American crime flicks, which was revolutionize that genre with its fractured narrative and Euro art film-inspired sensibility. The Cooke version is just solid storytelling that makes the most of the strengths of comics as a visual medium, and like any good adaptation of a work from a different medium, it honors the source material without being overly reverential (for instance, Parker's resemblance to bodybuilder-turned-actor Edson Stroll, who played the leader of the exiled beautiful people in Twilight Zone's "Eye of the Beholder" ep, is quite a departure from Westlake's vision of Parker as a more rugged-looking Jack Palance type).


I'm more acquainted with Cooke's animation and cover illustration work than his Catwoman and Spirit comics. The Hunter has made me want to check out more of Cooke's comics. These storyboards Cooke pencilled for Batman: The Animated Series' "Legends of the Dark Knight" homage to The Dark Knight Returns, which I've taken from Paul Dini and Chip Kidd's 1998 Batman: Animated coffeetable book, are Hunter-like in their intensity:


Westlake never granted Hollywood producers permission to use Parker's name in their adaptations of his novels because he would only allow them to retain the name if they agreed to do a series of Parker movies, and none of them had sequels on their minds (hence the name "Walker" in Point Blank, "McClain" in 1969's The Split and "Porter" in Payback). Cooke's novel is the first Parker adaptation in which Westlake gave the okay to use the name, possibly because Cooke planned on writing and drawing a four-volume series. Scheduled for summer 2010, Cooke's next Parker comic will adapt both The Man with the Getaway Face and The Outfit, which director John Flynn made into a solid 1973 Robert Duvall vehicle of the same title that's more straightforward than the stylized Point Blank, so it's blander in comparison, but it deserves as much notice as Boorman's movie (The Outfit isn't on DVD yet, although TCM occasionally broadcasts it).

Screw Avatar: The Next Whitewasher, The Twilight Saga: Emotards and the other unpromising blockbusters that are slated so far to hit theaters next summer. The one true blockbuster of summer 2010 will be found not in a multiplex, but in comic shops and bookstores.