Hard Time is the first in the Focus line, DC's attempt to create some new superhero concepts off the beaten path from their regular imprint. So far, the publicity hasn't really wowed me, and the central concept, promoted as "superpowers in the real world," sounds like rehash of a lot of dead superhero universes. Hard Time is off to an okay start, but it didn't really knock my socks off either. Gerber's script relies on the reader having remarkably little faith in the U.S. justice system (even less than I have, which is difficult) and seems very much contrived to drive the character into jail without making him into a bad guy in any way. The artwork by Brian Hurtt and colorist Brian Haberlin, however, is gorgeous, and Gerber has generally done stuff I've liked in the past, so I'm hoping that the book can get past a somewhat shaky foundation and take advantage of a fairly unusual premise.
Though the Columbine shootings were several years ago, the notion of kids committing violence against one another in schools seems to have become a sad fact of reality. Gerber taps into that fear with the central crime that drives Hard Time, but unfortunately, in trying to make his protagonist sympathetic, his take on the crime seems a little off. Ethan and his friend planned to hold the entire school hostage, drawing the attention of the police, and yet get away with it all being just a joke. The jock is scared enough to wet himself, and yet still has enough bravery (and stupidity) to mouth off to the kids with guns. The kid who snaps isn't just pushed too far, he's clearly a rampant psycho who knew going in what he was going to do. And Ethan, poor Ethan, is really a victim in all this, despite the fact that he was stupid enough to get involved in the first place and that any decent forensics and criminal investigation would clear him of the more outrageous charges.
There's definitely a feeling that the system is railroading Ethan, that he made a bad decision and got himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and was just doomed from there. Unfortunately, while this kind of idea can work (it worked very well for Oni Press's Three Strikes), Hard Time feels more like the script is railroading the system. Even granting that Ethan's manifestation of power makes for some forensic questions, it seems silly that not one witness nor any of the investigations could put him a little more in the clear, and instead everyone is all too willing to take the side of the grieving parents of a boy who actually committed most of the crimes Ethan stands accused of. It's not completely out of the realm of possibility, but given that we're already accepting superpowers and the whole notion of the Focus line is that it's supposed to be more "realistic," I was disappointed to see this very comic book genre version of a legal system being stood up as a central plot point.
All of that said, though the specific take on the justice system and media commentary surrounding it reads a little bit more like parody and less like real world to me, Gerber does have some interesting concepts here. A young boy whose future is taken away from him entirely is tragic, and the notion of superpowers manifesting just as he goes to jail certainly has potential. Unfortunately, trying to keep your protagonist sympathetic enough to work as a main character even while making his actions bad enough to justify such a harsh sentence is a difficult, maybe even impossible, task, and Gerber's script isn't quite up to it.
While I was mostly disappointed in the story aspect of Hard Time, there is one saving grace, and that is the artwork. Brian Hurtt first caught my eye when he was working on Queen & Country, and he's gotten better with every project since. His work is stylized, with a simpler, animated look, but it also has a very strong level of detail. With Hurtt on artwork, it's a lot easier to buy into Hard Time as being set in the real world, because we see details like the spilled food in the cageteria or the shadows in Ethan's interrogation room. In addition, his characters are remarkably expressive, and very capable of the subtle layers of expression like a mixture of remorse, guilt and fear on Ethan's face or the troubled yet stern appearance of the judge. Haberlin's colors are also terrific, a sort of "artistically lighted" look of cool blues, purples and reds.
