Max Hamm is a tale of homages, to pulp fiction and film, to fairy tales, to Little Golden Books, but Cammuso rises above being a mere parody or homage, creating a fun and engaging story of those noir standards, lost love and troubled women, with the flavor of fairy tales mixed in. Half the fun is to be found in Cammuso's absolute perfection when it comes to capturing the voice of those noir narrators, with their street smart metaphors and puns, but just as much can be found in an interesting mystery that takes its basic spine from children's fiction and gives it a new twist.
The obvious parallel to Max Hamm is Fables, and it does seem like Cammuso and Willingham followed the same playbook to some extent. Rose Red is a bit of a sexy wild child, for example, and it wouldn't surprise me, given the denouement of this issue, if Prince Charming turns out to be just one guy in many stories, as he has in Fables. However, Cammuso is covering territory that Willingham hasn't, and also territory he has in different ways, and the approach here is considerably different. Fables is very much a modern story, despite the Bogart-like detective that Bigby has become, and Max Hamm is a story of the 1940s pulp tradition.
In addition, the style of Max Hamm is that of an illustrated book mixed with a comic-book. Cammuso uses two styles, the panel-to-panel style of comics and the illustrated text style of novels, using the latter for flashbacks, and it works very well. I'm especially pleased with the black and white "painted" look of Cammuso's illustrations, each of which conveys a lot of information about the scene. One picture of Rose Red really is worth a thousand words, and each snapshot of Hamm's case involving Snow White compliments the text very effectively. Max Hamm is a deceptively small looking book, but there's a lot of story packed into these pages.
What I really like about Max Hamm is that Cammuso can take a sort of humorous approach to this work without making it nothing more than a funny book. Some of the narration is very witty, including a use of a double-meaning of the word matches or a reference to hares and tortoises in relation to gambling, and a lot of it really made me chuckle. In addition, Cammuso does some clever blending of fairy tale archetypes with his pulp setting, especially his recasting of the evil queen as a washed-up film star or the seven dwarves as a bunch of small-time crooks, with names like Dumpy, Jumpy and Spanish Johnny.
Max Hamm, Fairy Tale Detective is a charming and funny book, showing off Cammuso's way with words as well as his attractive artwork. Fans of Fables and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, or anyone with a taste for pop-culture pastiche, will especially enjoy it, but anyone with a funny bone should give it a look.
