Now here's a project designed to inspire either great admiration or questions about one's mental health. Joe "Jog" McCulloch and Tucker Stone will spend the next week or so critically examining every single one of the (French) Humanoids graphic novels that DC published between 2004-05. The essays will bounce back and forth between their respective sites with some potential spillover into The Savage Critics. Jog kicks it off with a look at Miss: Better Living Through Crime, a 1999-2002 crime noir series by Philippe Thirault, Marc Riou and Mark Vigourou:

It's pulpy, sure -- there's a knife fight with a wild man undergoing electroshock therapy, sniper hits on a golf course leading to all-out war with the Ku Klux Klan and a high melodrama grand finale that probably ties things up a bit too neatly -- but the emphasis in the title is as much on Living as Crime. Some sins against tight plotting are committed, yes, with place and mood and emotion set as the vice; you grow to understand the skewed moral code of these characters, picked up through the accumulation of their actions, a mix of doing what's right and getting things done to get to somewhere better.