Review time! with ‘The Ends’

“Remember how you made me crazy, remember how I made you scream”

David and Maria Lapham bring us The Ends, which is from our buddies at Bad Idea. Lapham provides the art, with Scorpio Steele helping on the flashbacks, while Bill Crabtree colors it and Dave Sharpe letters it. It’s 19.99, and it’s 141 pages.

The Ends is the story of Angelo and Jennifer, who fall in love in Oceanside, North Carolina, in 1985. Unfortunately for all concerned, Angelo is Hispanic and Jennifer is a neo-Nazi. Oh dear. The Laphams make the point that kids only know what they’ve been taught, and Jennifer was raised by a racist who has passed it on to his kids. Ironically, the reason she’s in Oceanside is because her grandfather, who fought in World War II, lives there, so she’s a bit messed up. She’s clearly not as horrible as her father and her brother, who’s a true believer, but she still says some dumb things to Angelo that causes a rift between them, even though his grandfather, who also fought in the war, tells him that Angelo shouldn’t be too mad at her because she’s just parroting what she hears at home. It’s a nice, sweet love story, but it’s not the entire point of the story. Lapham likes his violent thrillers, so he gives us one — Jennifer’s brother, Jack, who’s extremely into being a Nazi, discovers that she’s dating a “Mexican” (Angelo, needless to say, was born in the States), so he gets the word out to his Nazi guys to converge on the town, mainly as cover so he can hunt Jennifer down and kill them both. Meanwhile, a bunch of WWII vets decide to fight back against the Nazis invading their town because, well, they did it once, so they’ll do it again, damn it!

This is the kind of story Lapham loves, and he’s good at it, so this is a solid action-thriller. He gives us a slow burn for the first half, as tensions rise when the skinheads show up and slowly begin to make their presence known, and then someone is killed, so things get hot pretty quickly. Jennifer knows what’s going on, and she warns Angelo, who doesn’t want to talk to her but still listens, because it’s more important than his fractured romance. The man in charge, sort of, is a colonel who’s honoring his dead wife at the VFW at the beginning of the book, and Lapham does a nice job with him — he’s the kind of guy who seems like an absolute douchebag in real life, like, say, Churchill or Patton, but is indispensable in wartime, and it’s fun to watch him organize all the old veterans as they figure out a way to fight back. The Laphams never turn it into an apocalyptic battle — there are little battles all over, and some don’t go the veterans’ way, but they inexorably bring their experience to bear, and it’s well done because it feels more like the way something like this would play out. We also get nice flashbacks to the war, showing how some of these guys got through it and how it turned them, forty years later, into the men they are.

A couple of things make this a bit more interesting than just a standard “good guys-vs.-bad guys” thing. Of course, Jennifer realizing how wrong she is the main point, but we never get the sense that she was that committed anyway, so even though she says some stupid stuff about Hitler (he fixed Germany’s economy, which he very much did not, but it’s something Hitler-lovers say), we don’t ever think she’s really racist. The Laphams hint around at the virulent misogyny of Nazism, too, which is nice because there are female skinheads, and they throw just a few lines in there that lets us know the male skinheads have no respect for them, even if the women try hard to be hard (this can be, of course, be read as commentary on the MAGA movement, which uses women to draw in other women but discards them when they try to actually exercise power). It’s also interesting to follow Jack through the story, because as despicable as he is, he’s a bit more nuanced than we might expect. He seems to be a true believer, but it’s clear he’s parroting his dad as much as Jennifer is. He’s not as smart as Jennifer, but he does have a dial-up modem and he has created an on-line group and he seems to know how to push their buttons (this is wildly anachronistic — I can buy the modem, maybe, but not a Usenet-style message board in 1985, but whatever), so he’s not just a mouth-breather. Yet, when he finds out that Jennifer has become a “race traitor,” he seems to fixate on that far more than being a Nazi — the Laphams hint around that maybe his interest in Jennifer is more than just a brother concerned that his sister is dating some “impure” dude, and Jack becomes a bit more maniacal as the comic goes along. It’s a disturbing character arc, but it’s interesting to read it in the context of the bigger “battle” going on in the town.

Lapham’s art is, as always, very good, and he does something interesting with the flashbacks. I’m not sure who’s doing what — it looks vaguely like Lapham’s work, so I wonder if he did loose layouts and Steele penciled them, because the lines are a bit softer, providing a nice contrast to the “present day” stuff. Crabtree gives the flashbacks a deeper blue tint, which helps them stand out as well. It’s pretty neat, and I’m glad they did it that way. I don’t have much more to say about the art, because, well, it’s Lapham. You know what his art looks like!

I’m glad Bad Idea has finally figure out that their business plan was shit and they should probably do trades and whatnot to get their product into more hands. The Laphams do some nice work for them, so it’s nice that more people are able to read it!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆