“So wake me up at the border when we reach Mexico, I’ll tell you a secret I don’t even know”
Kyle Starks does some fun comics, and although Wrestle Heist isn’t quite as good as, say, The 6 Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton, it’s still very fun. 
The trade, which is by Starks and colorist Vladimir Popov, is from Image, priced at $16.99, and it’s 137 pages long.
As I’ve noted before (I think), I am not a wrestling person. I did not watch it when I was a kid, which I guess was a Golden Age of wrestling, and I do not watch it as an adult. It just doesn’t do anything for me. I do, however, like fiction about wrestling, which is strange. I thought Heels, the post-Green Arrow Stephen Amell show, was wildly underrated, and I enjoy comics about wrestling, from Charles Soule’s Strongman to, well, this. It seems like wrestlers in fiction are far less likely to be assholes than real wrestlers, most of whose stage presence seems to be “I’m an asshole, but I’m swole so you love me.” I could be wrong, I guess. But I’ll keep my wrestling fandom in the fictional world, thanks very much, such as this comic. Sterling Steele, who’s the best heel in the business, is leaving Buddy Hansen’s operation to go work for a rival. In his last fight for Hansen, his opponent breaks his neck, very clearly on Hansen’s orders. Hansen, it turns out, is an absolute dick, and he wasn’t about to let Sterling leave for greener pastures. A year later, Sterling is up and around (but he can’t wrestle again, because one wrong move could paralyze or kill him), and he’s come up with a plan to rob Hansen of all his filthy lucre. It’s a set-up we’ve seen a million times, but heist comics are so much fun, it doesn’t matter why the thieves want to heist someone!
This is not, you understand, a comic that wants to surprise you. Sterling and his group — the Gravedigger, an old, half-blind, retired wrestler; El Hijo de Ocho Bola, the son of a luchador who can’t join the gang because he hurt his foot; 
and the Bearwolf, a ridiculously over-the-top wrestler who speaks in florid pronouncements, usually in the third person — are clearly good guys, Hansen is clearly the bad guy, and Starks is not the kind of creator who’s going to let the bad guy win and all the good guys die or go to prison. The question is not whether Sterling will succeed, but how he will succeed, and that’s always the fun part when you get heist stories like this (the other kind of heist story, where the thieves might not be quite as good or the targets not quite as bad, might introduce some doubt whether the heist will go off, but this is not that kind of story). Starks also has to do the “gathering of the team,” which can be fun, as it is here. Sterling is a clever fellow, and what’s nice about the book is that he seems to have all the contingencies covered. Even when things go a bit sideways, we’re not sure if it’s part of the ultimate plan or if it’s something that Sterling needs to think his way out of. There’s also the requisite character growth, as Ocho Bola wants to bond with his son, who’s gone a bit wayward in his life, and Gravedigger really hates Bearwolf but realizes that that’s probably misguided, and Sterling wants to make sure he can provide for his daughter, who lives with his estranged wife and her new husband. None of this, of course, is all that unique, but it’s all in the way you tell it. Starks does a very nice job giving each of the characters interesting and unique personalities (Bearwolf, with his third person narrative about himself and his “Mmmm-hmmm”s peppering his speech, is the most fun, but they’re all pretty keen) and adding fun asides, like the pompous “wrestling historian” who pops in occasionally like that stuffy dude from Rocky Horror, and the result is a heist story that moves swiftly along but gives us a lot to chew on. 
The twists aren’t shocking at all, but they do come at nice moments, and, of course, Sterling gets one more moment in the ring. Of course he does!
I don’t have a ton to say about the art — Starks has a good, cartoony style that works well for somewhat over-the-top stories like this, because his exaggerations — the enraged wrestler with the popping eyes and steam shooting out of his nostrils, for instance — look normal in a world like this, and given wrestling itself is over the top, the bombastic art fits the tone perfectly. His designs for the various wrestlers are quite fun, and his style mitigates the few moments of real violence in the book, because it can’t be too bloody or it would clash with the rest of the comic. Despite the cartoonishness of the art, it’s fairly detailed, which is good for a heist comic, as we always know where we are and what’s going on as the plot clicks into place. I don’t have a lot more to say — it’s good art, and it helps tell the story well.
As you might recall, I’m a big fan of heist comics, and I tend to like Starks’s comics, so this is a win-win for me. If you dig heist stories, too, this is a nifty one. Go and seek it!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
