“I bet we wouldn’t get too far before the transformation takes and blood lust tanks and crave gets slaked”
Ed Brisson writes some cool crime comics, and Wild Animals is another one. Much like News From the Fallout, which I reviewed yesterday, it falls a bit too much into cliché, but Andy Kuhn’s art helps mitigate that a bit, while Brisson does manage to do some better things that Chris Condon did on NFtF, so I like this more than I did that one. 
So let’s get into it — Dee Cunniffe colors this, Rob Jones letters it, Christina Harrington edits it, Mad Cave publishes it, and it’s 110 pages long and costs $17.99.
Our story begins with a young dude named Neil hanging out with his very sick mother, who’s in a hospital. Neil, we learn, is a bit adrift because his father was killed by crooked cops when Neil was a kid, and his mom fled the town to avoid getting killed herself, but that means that Neil never had a great upbringing, and then his mom got sick. Neil’s a bit of a milquetoast at the beginning of the book, as his landlord throws him out of their apartment because they’re so late on the rent and Neil just stews about, then the convenience store he works at gets robbed, and the teens who are robbing it beat him up even though he’s not really interested in stopping them. The beatdown means he’s unable to get to the hospital in time to be with his mother when she dies, so, you know, Neil’s having a rough time of it. Before he got thrown out his apartment, he found a lockbox his mom had, so he breaks that open and discovers that his name had been changed, which is why he could never find any information on his dad’s death — he was looking for the wrong name. Once he finds his real name, he’s able to find the cops that killed his dad and where they are. 
So he sets off on a journey of revenge!!!
Now, if you’ve ever read a revenge tale, you can see all the twists coming a mile — a hundred miles! — away, but that can be fine if the writer can just barrel through them, and Brisson does that. This never slows down, as Neil finds the cops and begins figuring out how to take revenge, which goes both the way he wants and also a bit sideways, as you might expect. Brisson does a nice job showing how Neil, who has never done anything like this, might be able to figure out where the evil cops are and how to take them down. But he’s also terrible about it, because he’s just going off rage all the time and not thinking too much about the consequences, and Brisson does a decent job showing how this might work. There are a few problems with this, of course — if Neil bothered to ask one or two questions to anyone involved in this, a lot of horrible things could have been avoided, but then we wouldn’t have a plot. The other problem is that Neil really ought to be unable to move after a while because his injuries would be so serious. Fiction never really gets into how horribly injured some of these people would be and how it would incapacitate them, but for some reason, Neil’s injuries seem more egregious than usual — he gets in a pretty serious car accident but walks away almost completely unscathed, as his has minor cuts and scrapes but nothing bad. I get that it’s fiction, and we need Neil to keep going, but it’s still annoying. Writers need to knock it off!
Kuhn, however, is always good, and the book looks great. He has a strong line that, when he loosens up a bit, is a good contrast — the flashbacks to Neil’s youth stand out nicely from the rest of the book because Kuhn is a bit sketchier with the linework. 
He has a good sense of place, too, so the town where Neil lived and the cops still live feels like a real place, a bit seedy and worn down, a place you can believe a crooked cop could operate with impunity (unfortunately, as we know, crooked cops thrive everywhere, but this feels like a place where it wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow). He’s very good with the violence, too, as Neil really commits a lot of it and Kuhn shows how beaten up he is (which makes his lack of a concussion or other horrible injuries even more unusual), plus, Neil has severe old burns on his face and body and Kuhn does a very good job drawing them in (and Cunniffe does a really nice job coloring it). I always want Kuhn to do more work, because his work is very cool, and the art makes Brisson’s story work a bit better.
Brisson has written some fun crime comics, and Wild Animals is one of those. Like a lot of Brisson’s work, it does veer into cliché a bit too much, but Brisson usually does a good job just putting the throttle down and powering through, which goes a long way to make them entertaining enough so you can try to ignore the clichés. They still annoy me, but it’s still a fun book. And Kuhn’s art is always neat to see!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
