AIT/Planet Lar is known for their original graphic novels, but they also have a side business in finding and republishing hidden treasure, which seems to be the case with Johnny Dynamite. A lot of good crime comics have fallen through the cracks, and Johnny Dynamite is one of them, a strange mix of 50s crime and horror based on an old comic-book character and polished up by a couple of familiar names, Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty. Johnny Dynamite is clearly inspired by the hard-boiled detectives of Spillane, Hammett and Chandler, although it takes those archetypes and filters them through a comic-book sensibility, removing a lot of the moral gray area and presenting the hero as an avenging angel rather than a guy one step above the mobsters himself. While the plot and morality are pretty straightforward, however, the sensibilities are just left of center, and so this is less a forgotten crime comic and more an example of genre-bending at its finest.
Collins has a fairly legendary rep thanks to some of his well-known successes like Road to Perdition, but his style is actually not far removed from a lot of the classic comic-book scribes, and Johnny Dynamite has a feel not unlike some of the EC Crime Comics. The character relationships are pretty cookie-cutter, boiling down to the usual pulp archetypes of tough P.I., pining good girl and plenty of femme fatales, but they are as deep as they need to be for the story. Most important of all is the development of Johnny Dynamite, and Collins does a great job of painting him as a tough, relentless bastard with a heart of gold.
Though the characters are of the kind you'll see in most pulp stories, Collins and Beatty give the book a definite atmosphere of its own, and the feel of 1950s Vegas shines through in the book. Part of that is down to the occasional set-piece, such as the Devil's oasis, the desert movie shoot or the Vulture's Lair, but a lot of it comes in the fashions and dialogue that define the characters. This is an unusual gangster story, but it is a gangster story, and Collins and Beatty sure know how to flesh out these tough guys and sexy gals.
There are plenty of good gangster stories out there, though; what separates Johnny Dynamite are the occult and fantastic elements that fit so easily into the narrative. Dynamite accepts the living dead pretty easily, but the weirdness of the whole thing isn't lost on him and his cop friend, and I love that even the criminals need to keep things on the down-low. Collins posits an underworld scene that is actually tied in to the Underworld, with implications that Satan has his hands in more than a few criminal pies in Vegas, which is pretty interesting for the most part. The postscript to the story puts the thing a little too bluntly, serving up the villain's final reward in a way that feels both rushed and unnecessary, but in general I liked the mixture of occult and real-life bad guys.
Johnny Dynamite is a terrific read, with plenty of action and a likable, colorful narrator. Just as Joe Lansdale and Tim Truman breathed new life into a forgotten genre with their Jonah Hex mini-series, Collins and Beatty put a new twist on crime, and reintroduce a modern audience to a surprisingly rich forgotten character.
