Pulp Continues to Show Brubaker & Phillips at the Top of Their Game
- WRITER
- Ed Brubaker
- Artist
- Sean Phillips
- Cover Artist
- Sean Phillips, Jacob Phillips
- Publisher
- Image Comics
- Price
- 16.99
- Release Date
- 2020-07-29
- Colorist
- Jacob Phillips
The Eisner Award-winning creative team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips is back together for a new original graphic novel with Image Comics: Pulp.
Continuing their universally acclaimed partnership, this latest collaboration is a riveting tale of redemption, legacy and last chances. Pulp follows an aging cowboy outlaw who looks to secure one last score and go out in a blaze of glory, rather than resign himself to the inevitability of death. In their meditation of mortality, Brubaker and Phillips deliver a fantastic read that feels timely despite its period setting, with a gripping protagonist who powers the story forward.
Max Winter is an old writer in 1930s New York City who crafts western stories for pulp magazines to help make ends meet. Winters draws from his own experiences as a gunslinger in the Wild West, decades ago. As his age begins to catch up with him and the insidious influence of the Third Reich begins to spread from Europe to the United States, Max tries to find the courage to channel his own six-shooting legacy and prepare to go out on his own terms.
Drawing from his own recent brush with death, Brubaker makes Max Winter one of his most personal protagonists yet. While Brubaker is known to take the gloves off and deliver some truly heavy-handed, gritty noir, Pulp is not unrelentingly dark and grim. Readers see Max hitting his rock bottom, but he is determined as all hell not to stay there. Plus, with literal Nazis as the antagonists, Brubaker has provided a pitch-perfect method for Max to pick himself up and face off against the ultimate foe -- to find his own modicum of redemption, however he can.
Sean Phillips, joined by his son Jacob Phillips on colors, brings a Great Depression era New York to life, as its denizens struggle to keep their heads down and just get by. The art team is able to effectively convey the weight of the world and his own legacy falling on Max's world-weary shoulders, as the life he has built begins to implode around him.
Jacob Phillips' color palette provides a sun-baked quality to the western-oriented flashbacks, with a noted use of oranges and reds. These carry over to the story's relative present-day sequences as Max begins to tap into his past when he grows increasingly desperate and willing to commit violence. When that violence does arise, Sean Phillips delivers all the visceral thrills his previous work has been known for.
Twenty years on, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips continue to operate at the height of their collaborative powers, delivering another strong addition to their long-running partnership in Pulp. The comic weaves themes of mortality and redemption into a sort of neo-Western, as a cowboy takes on a different enemy at the frontier of America's soul, on the eve of World War II.
A genuine page-turner, moving at a deliberate pace as it explores its protagonist staring death in the face, Pulp is a fantastic, original graphic novel that elevates itself above genre constraints. It also provides a more uplifting message about making peace with coming to the end of one's life and making even the bloodiest legacy work towards the greater good.