Off The Shelf: All Greg Rucka, All The Time

Whiteout/Whiteout:Melt
Written by Greg Rucka
Art by Steve Lieber
Published by Oni Press, 1998 & 2000

What is there to say about Whiteout that hasn't been said before?  It's a book that got some near-universal praise, from diverse publications like the Comics Journal, Onion's AV Club, and, in a totally out-of-left-field surprise, from the jack-off wank fest that is the Comics Buyers Guide.  It is, as they say, a critical favorite.  Whether or not the sequel, Melt shares the title is beyond the reach of this journalist's research--our impeccably filed database of comic book reviews only goes back to 1999, missing Whiteout: Melt by a scant year.  We'll assume that the response was resoundingly negative.  Or positive, it doesn't really matter.

Both Whiteout stories consist of four-issue mini-series surrounding two characters--one being Carrie Stetko, a freckle faced federal marshal, and the other being that oft-underutilized continent Antarctica.  The first story is a straight up murder mystery that morphs into something more, and the other is pretty much a dogged chase book.  Rucka isn't shy to grab onto story tropes here--whether it's the big mistake that his cop character is running from or the early reveal of the villain, neither book is shy to operate within conventional lines.  That's part of Rucka's greatest strength as a writer, and one that's on display here, in his first major comics work.  Greg is able to maintain a level of pacing and structure that speaks to a faith in reliability: his thrillers are thrillers that operate by the numbers from a plot point of view, leaving him free to explore the dynamics of the human relationships on stage.  While Carrie has the aforementioned character-defining-on-the-job mistake that resulted in not only displacing her to Antarctica (in what one imagines isn't the sort of job any US Federal Marshall would be lining up for, Tommy Lee Jones  films notwithstanding) but her temper, and the destruction it wrought, leaves her basically friendless and haunted by nightmares.  In the initial Whiteout mini-series, one of those classic figure-out-why-somebody-is-dead whodunits, Carrie's difficulty to trust the right people or her instincts nearly gets her killed multiple times.  By the factory edition of a conclusion, Carrie hasn't even "found" herself again, if anything, she's produced more ammunition in her struggle to rely on anyone.

Melt is far less of a whodunit, and is actually more similar to the sort of awestruck special forces writing Garth Ennis flirts with--here, Carrie is again the main character, but she's sidelined by some well-trained black ops teams as they kill their way through Antarctica in pursuit of nuclear weaponry.  While Rucka uses the landscape of Antarctica mostly as setting in the original series, Melt is far more dependent on it for the story to work--it's impossible for someone in love with realism, as Rucka is, to believe that Carrie, even with help, could stop the sort of antagonists she's dealing with.  While the initial mini-series dealt with the simplicity of paranoid civilians in hopes of getting rich, these are the sort of men who appear in Jason Bourne movies.  A federal marshal, even one with some experience with firearms, couldn't hold their own.  Fortunately for Carrie, there's very little wetwork that goes on at the bottom of the world, and machine guns and Spetsnaz training can't defeat subzero temperatures.   

These aren't comics that expand the language of the medium, even by the kindest estimation.  The pleasure here is in the reading of a tightly wound narrative complimented by the sort of unusually static artwork that Rucka seems to prefer--if you've had any experience with his super-hero work on Batman or Wonder Woman, it's unlikely that you've found his work to be preferable when drawn in a more explosive fashion.  Much like Queen & Country and Checkmate, Rucka's writing on Whiteout shines far more when given the sort of gritty simplicity of Lieber's design.  While it does no favors to the action sequences, Whiteout isn't the sort of story that would be better told if everyone was jumping 20 feet into the air or punching each other for 6 pages.

Queen & Country Volumes 1-3
Written by Greg Rucka
Art by Steve Rolston, Brian Hurtt, Bryan O'Malley, Christine Norrie & Leandro Fernandez
Published by Oni Press, 2001-2003

Queen & Country isn't the sort of thing that one imagines would have much of a place in the mainstream comics market--even at it's most basic, the stories are dark, difficult pieces of reality, told at only two speeds: breakneck and molasses.  Tara Chace, the main character who appeared throughout the 7 year run of the series, is a quiet construction of seething emotion, a woman no stranger to drink or violence.  Dealing with her contradictory behavior is no different from accepting the basic asshole-a-tude of any major character in spy or detective fiction--but unlike those sort of stories, Tara and her MI-6 compatriots very rarely get the chance to succeed.  As is made clear in the second volume of Rucka's series, the job deals with people who will be "exemplary in the field...until there's nothing left of [them] to use."  It's not that it's "impossible to retire" from being a spy, it's that none of those that survive ever get the chance to become actual human beings.  Tara's relationships with men are some of the most painful portions of the series--when she can be honest about who she is with someone, it's usually someone who is suffering on the front lines beside her, or it's a passionless one-night-stand with the sort of drunken assholes that she can find at a bar to participate in passionless one-night-stands. 

Of course, that's part and parcel of the story Rucka clearly wanted to tell.  As is mentioned in the second voume of Queen & Country, there are people who exist who enjoy the sort of assassination Tara performs in Rucka's first story--but that's not what he wanted to write about.  Quite a relief, actually--while it's difficult at times to see the horrors at which Tara participates in, it's far preferable to yet another story about the sort of cold-blooded violence wrought on television.  And again, like Whiteout, Rucka only deals with one artist that is willing to draw that sort of kinetics--if 24 wanted to be a successful comic book, it could do far worse than to hire Leandro Fernandez.  (However, Fernandez doesn't totally work--his being the only chapter in the Queen & Country saga where Tara is drawn in tight pants with erect nipples.)  Otherwise, this is a series that ignored titillation completely, preferring to immerse itself completely in the stories of spies and their behavior, with a muted style of art from some real talents, including a Bryan O'Malley before the Scott Pilgrim explosion.  Although the body count of these first three chapters is lower than some of the later chapters, the raw quality of the stories arrived fully-developed.  Unlike Whiteout, where Rucka told entertaining stories with little impact, the entire run of Queen & Country stands as some of the best comics of the decade, and is one of the few things that will be still considered valuable when the 2010 books start showing up.

-Tucker Stone, 2008

Comments

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

Queen and Country does for espionage what The Wire (and, to a lesser extent, Homicide) did for policework--radically deglamorize it. In both cases, the professions are shown to be mostly boring, futile and dominated by jostling careerists and departmental politics. Thrilling genre adventure!

I also love just how budget Chace's division is. This is the most important spy agency in Britain and there's, like, only five people in that dingy office (and they don't seem especially well paid). That seems much more plausible than "Q" and all those exploding cuff-links that shoot acid when they turn into high-power magnets with the bees in their mouths.

Have you read the most recent collection, which is, apparently, also the final one, at least for the foreseeable future?

[Tucker Stone]

I have read that one-i enjoyed it, but i felt like it went a little far down a road Rucka had already explored with a bit more subtlety earlier in the series--Tara's relationship with violence. When I first read it, in issue format, i was surprised how far he'd taken it--now, i feel like it might have even been too much. Pregnancy? Fisticuffs?

Since writing this piece-it's a few months old, actually-i've had the chance to see the first series of Sandbaggers, the BBC show Rucka used as inspiration for his treatment of the security service. While Rucka clearly brings exceptional creativity to the story, I think he'd agree that the deglamorization is something that's taking, in whole cloth, from that series. It's an incredibly bleak show, set to a very low tempo that makes even The Wire look frenetic. Dingy offices, a tiny staff, and an overriding sense of bureaucratic natterings--all of that is pure Sandbaggers.

All that aside, Queen & Country is a pretty wonderful series--i've found myself lately trying to seek out more in this genre, and it holds up in comparison to some of the masters, like Lawton and even Le Carre.

Great to hear from you Jones. Thanks for reading.

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

Yeah, I agree. It was a bit too much bang, not enough whimper. A more fitting finale would have been four issues of Chace getting drunk, falling over and crying.