Everybody knows….
Creative Staff:
Story: Christa Faust & Gary Phillips
Art: Andrea Camerini
Additional Inks: Jed Dougherty
Colors: Marco Lesko
Letters: Tom Williams
What They Say:
With the Central Park killer still at large, Roxy and Nick try to let some steam off at an impromptu punk show at CBGBs. But across town, it looks like their only piece of evidence is about to fall into the wrong hands…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Okay okay okay okay okay, I’m a little late on this one. I completely blame the holidays.
That actually segues well into this story, considering it takes place around Xmas. Whereas my holiday was nice and low key, Roxy, her friends, and New York in general are having a rather terrible one. The Central Park killer still roams the streets and the only piece of evidence was placed in the absolute wrong hands. To make matters worse, Aiesha—another performer at Peepland—discovers that the cops suspect her son of being the killer and now she needs to raise cash to hire a lawyer. Her girlfriend, A.J., takes it on herself to get the money, an act that leads to disaster.
And that’s just for starters.
The lesson is here is that in New York, in the 80s, no one in power can be trusted. The cops arrest the wrong people, not caring for the truth. Most of them are on the graft, and the most powerful man in town goes to any lengths to protect his son—a murdering slime who strangles women in the park. Trust is at an all-time low, and the only people making any sort of stand are pornographers and petty criminals.
Of course, neither New York nor the 80s hold the lock on corporate or police corruption. Although Peepland takes place thirty someodd years ago, the story is startlingly, sadly prescient. In his afterword, Gary Phillips links the present and past, talking about the election of Trump (who obviously served as the inspiration for Simon Went) and the death of Leonard Cohen as well as the story of the Central Park Five—a notorious case of racial profiling and false imprisonment. As much as we would like to believe that the past is a distant country we can never visit, Peepland reminds us that it’s here, ever present, in the soil and the rocks, in the air and the water, in the granite we use to build our monuments, and that every action we take affects others. As Phillips writes, “To paraphrase Cohen’s ‘Everybody Knows,’ the game is fixed and all we can do is duck and dodge, regroup and get our hustle on. And just maybe we can make it through to the other side.”
That seems like an odd sentiment for a hardboiled story, but only on the surface. Certainly the genre features many cases of awful people doing awful things and getting away with it, but more often than not the protagonists exist in a world where “the game is fixed” and instead of trying to play it, they decide the only option is to go outside the rules. Or, as Ryan Phillipe says in the great movie The Way of the Gun: “We do not accept your natural order.”
If you haven’t guessed, Peepland operates on multiple levels. On the surface, it’s a damn entertaining hardboiled story, but underneath that surface, it contains a clear and powerful purpose that structures everything we read and see on the page. Good stories are like good watches: every cog, gear, wheel, spring works together for a singular purpose, and Peepland certainly proves it. While most comics are Casios, Peepland is a Rolex.
That precision extends to the plot. There’s no waste here. Every moment, every line of dialogue, every pencil line does exactly what it needs to do, and the comic fully immerses you in the time, the place, and the situation thanks to the excellent art by Camerini, Dougherty, and Lesko.
In Summary:
Hard Case Crime definitely comes out of the gates, swinging with this title. Peepland is a damn near perfect comic, hardboiled in all the right ways, sympathetic to its flawed and lost characters, and oddly—sadly—prescient for our time. Dr. Josh gives this an….
Grade: A+
Age Rating: N/A
Released By: Titan Comics
Release Date: January 11th, 2017
MSRP: $3.99
