It's a mini-series based on... the license for a car commercial. It sounds insane, except that the license is for the completely fun BMW Films starring Clive Owen, the publisher is Dark Horse, known for doing some of the coolest licensed comics ever and the creator at the forefront of the whole thing is the legendary Matt Wagner. So, with the potential pitfalls of doing a comic about car chases in comic-book form and trying to tell stories about a deliberately enigmatic and sketchy character, how did Wagner do? Pretty well, actually. The car chases themselves aren't as exciting as I'd like, feeling like they could have used a little manga decompression, but Wagner nails the lead character's personality, and he and Ruiz Velasco really do serve up some fun cinematic moments. This is absolutely one of those things Warren Ellis would once have called "Pop" comics, but it's a fun use of the medium and an absolute must for those who loved The Hire short films.
Clive Owen and a roster of impressive directors created a new action hero in the mysterious (and never named) driver of The Hire films, someone who has a roguish sense of humor and code of honor to match and driving skills rather than the ability to karate kick, shoot guns or do detective work. Because so much of the personality of the character came from Owen's work, it was going to be difficult to match that in comic-book form, but Wagner and Velasco do a pretty good job of it. Their version of the driver looks more like an American roughneck than the more cultured professional image that Owen presents, but it's still fitting, and the narration that the character provides really gets across his somewhat bemused dry humor exceptionally well.
Every one of the BMW Films that I really loved had some kind of memorable moment, and The Hire #1 accomplishes that task as well. The sudden appearance of the kidnappers and the way they convey their message is that moment in The Hire #1, and it's a terrific little storytelling sequence, with an element of fun to go with the element of danger that the characters present. There are also some terrific and memorable lines from the driver/narrator, notably "there goes ten thousand dollars worth of shoes."
The key element of The Hire #1 and whether the transition from film to comics was going to work, though, was in the chase sequence, an inevitability in the films and thus in the comics as well. Wagner and Velasco were up against some formidable competition, some beautifully framed chase sequences from directors who have done some memorable chases in big Hollywood flicks as well as in the BMW Films. Wagner's sensibilities are, for lack of a better word, a little more "American" than I would have liked for a chase sequence, giving the sense of frozen snapshots in the midst of the chase rather than a strong sense of motion, but within that framework, he and Velasco do some nice work, notably the shots of the car careening off the road and into the desert. In addition, I'm a huge fan of the work of both these artists, and while I might have wished for a more detailed look at the car (one of the stars of the book, after all), in general I loved the look of the book.
There was pretty much no way that The Hire #1 was going to match up to the short films that spawned the comic, but that wasn't really the mission. The mission was to take what worked about the films, namely a quirky and intriguing lead character and a flexible situation that could be changed to fit the style of the creators, and transition it to the comics medium. In that regard, The Hire #1 is a success, and I can't wait to see what some of the upcoming creators, particularly Katsuhiro Otomo, can do with this book.
