by Randy Lander

AMERICAN CENTURY: SCARS AND STRIPES TP Mildly Recommended (6/10) DC Comics/Vertigo imprint Writers: Howard Chaykin & David Tischman Pencils: Marc Laming Inks: John Stokes Colors: Pam Rambo & Jamison Letters: Ken Bruzenak Editor: Shelly Bond Price: $8.95 US/$14.75 CAN I've said throughout my reviews of this series that it looked like it needed to be in trade paperback form, because it seemed paced for such a format. And I do believe that it reads better with the storyline collected all in one place. However, this first storyline still has too many characters and not enough space to move, and in the end I think it was less a question of format and more a question of pacing and creative choices. This isn't a terrible book, but it's certainly rough, and I'm surprised to see such mainstream venues as Time and Entertainment Weekly heralding it as some kind of revelation in comics. Chaykin has done better work in the past, and Tischman is doing better work on Cable, of all things! Perhaps the mainstream press just doesn't know what the medium is capable of and thus aren't comparing this to the many better books that are out there, or maybe it's me who's missing something. At any rate, from my point of view, American Century remains a good concept with some solid creative talent behind it and a few major flaws, whether read in single issue or trade paperback format. Block starts out as an interesting character, someone with higher morals that doesn't fit into modern (and somewhat decadent) American society. He's a perfect narrator, the outsider looking in on all these historical events with a jaded eye. Not exactly heroic, in fact something of a jerk, he still has considerably more depth than any of the other characters. However, as the story goes on, Harry turns from an outsider looking in to Mr. Perfect. Every woman throws themselves at him as if he were in a porno, he's pivotal to every story going on around him and he's generally presented as deserving of all the good fortune he gets. By the time Harry Block has fully become Harry Kraft, he had erased most of my sympathy for him and become just another scumbag in the cesspool that Chaykin and Tischman are painting as the American-dominated world of the 1950s. This is a period piece, and I do have to give the writers and artists credit for establishing the period. The morality of the time, hiding the drug and sex excesses of the 1960s away rather than acknowledging them yet, is contrasted nicely with the racism, which is still prevalent and accepted. It's a great time to be a white male in America, but not such a great time to be anything else. And the politics of Guatemala are so realistic and complex that I had trouble following along with them. Laming's work on the book has a weakness in that his characters look all too alike, but I can't fault his depictions of Guatemala or Illinois as being anything less than a picture perfect depiction of what those places might have looked like in 1949. The problem seems to be that the creators either aren't sure what they want the book to be, or they've decided and it's something that doesn't interest me at all. I'm afraid it might be the latter. I was promised something of an adventure comic, and instead what we've gotten is a lot of talking heads and an inordinate amount of sex. The sexual aspect in this arc is not as prevalent as it would become, but by the time we got to Rosa throwing herself at Harry I was already feeling a bit silly for reading the book. I had thought that the book really needed to be read in chunks of story rather than serialized issues, but that doesn't seem to have helped much. I still had a lot of trouble keeping up with the various factions of CIA, KGB, smugglers, revolutionaries, dictators and their ambitious wives. It didn't help that none of these characters were fleshed out well, and so the CIA operatives and KGB operatives were interchangeable, as were the Guatemalan leader and the revolutionary general. Nor did it help that Laming's artwork often made the characters really hard to identify. Honestly, I didn't realize until reading this volume in collected form (and flipping back to reread) that Harry's friend Ramirez and Harry's friend Jorge were different people, largely because neither of them gets fleshed out at all. Tischman and Chaykin are in such a hurry to introduce the cast of dozens, reveal all the politics and finish up the arc that by the time they've laid the groundwork, the story is needing a wrap-up and an epilogue. We never really get a feel for what the consequences are, because for Harry there are no consequences, and as a result it's hard to really care what happens in the story. It's funny, I expected to like the book more upon reading it in collected form, but instead the flaws that I saw in single issues have been amplified by reading it all together. I respect what the creators are trying to do, and I think they've chosen very interesting settings and subject matter, but the execution just is not working out for me. I really want to like this book. But for now, American Century is a tease, exciting its readers with the promise but not actually delivering the goods. Email Randy Lander comments about this review.