By: Rick Remender (writer), Greg Tocchini (art) & Rus Wooton (letters)
The Story: Double crosses abound as an unlikely trio tries to pull off the last crime in American history.
What’s Good: This issue kept me completely on the edge of my seat. It has about 5 good plot twists and double crosses as the trio trying to pull off their caper switches allegiances left and right. I often roll my eyes at these sorts of plot twists because I find that the plot twists are just gratuitous: the writer is creating a plot twist just for the sake of shaking things up. In LDoAC, all of the plot twists happen within the normal flow of the story and you are not sure they are over until you see “The End” on the final page. Even at that point, you feel that if Remender and Tocchini had allowed us to keep watching the characters for a few panels longer, something else would have happened.
Remender also deserves huge kudos for outstanding character work. The bad guy is really and truly loathsome. As a reader, you are really pulling for someone to put a bullet in this dude. Meanwhile, I found myself really hoping that the other two members of the criminal trio would pull off the crime and somehow overcome their criminal natures to stop double crossing each other. It’s very hard to pull off this sort of character development in a miniseries, but Remender does it very well.
Before moving on to the art, I’m going to throw one more bone to Remender by heaping some praise on this cool concept he created with the radio signal that will prevent anyone from doing any action that they know to be criminal. This is a neat enough idea, but I really appreciate that he took it to the next step by showing the mayhem this causes in the criminal community. We’ve all heard how folks are criminals partially because they don’t know how to do anything else. Well, imagine the mayhem you might resort to if YOUR job was about to be legislated out of existence. These criminals literally will have nothing to do as they have no relevant job skills.
All of this will be neat enough, but Tocchini’s art pulls it all together. His linework is very raw and alive. The characters all look like living, breathing people who have goals and aspirations. This is one of those times when I find myself lacking the proper words for explaining how much I enjoyed the art, but I’ll put it this way: When I read creator-owned projects from smaller publishers, I am always keeping my eye open for artists that I wouldn’t mind commissioning a sketch from someday and Tocchini is now “on my list”.
Finally (and this might seem like a boring thing) this series is a triumph for Radical’s double-length comic format. Even though this is only a 3 issue series, it has all the weight of a 6 issue series, BUT due to the format, Remender didn’t have to come up with 5 arbitrary cliffhangers to end issues 1-5.
What’s Not So Good: I have no complaints about the finished product, but sheesh… It took awhile to finish this series. I know that delays are inevitable, but they still drive me batty as a die-hard single issues buyer. My only request would be if the creators “know” that a series is going to be slow coming out that they just tell us what kind of timeline to expect because I find myself forgetting major plot elements when months pass between issues.
Conclusion: This is a criminal masterpiece. Must read!
Grade: A-
- Dean Stell
Filed under: Other Tagged: | Dean Stell, Greg Tocchini, Last Days of American Crime #3, Radical, review, Rick Remender, Rus Wooton, The Last Days of American Crime, The Last Days of American Crime #3, The Last Days of American Crime #3 review
[...] good artist. And he has done fantastic work with Remender before, as Dean noted in his review of The Last Days of American Crime #3. So I’m not sure what happened to make this book look like a mess. Not one person stands in a [...]
Great review. This book was worth the wait, wasn’t it?
That’s a really nice cover for a book.