The last time Judd Winick stepped away from super-heroes in his work for DC, we got the highly enjoyable vampire story Blood and Water. Though Caper is not a Vertigo book, it has some of the same feel, and Winick seems to have struck gold again in a genre that he's not currently known for. In fact, the genre of the first arc of caper, historical crime, is one that is rarely touched upon in comics, and the story puts me in mind of films like Once Upon A Time in America or Gangs of New York, exploring a time when organized crime was much more prevalent than it is today. Farel Dalrymple, best known for his surreal and hauntingly beautiful Pop Gun War, provides the same detailed urban setting with a more realistic approach, and it's a perfect match to Winick's story.
From reading advanced press, I'm aware that Caper is in fact three different story arcs with three different artists. So it's tough to judge the whole series based on this first issue, given that the tone, the characters and the artist will change when this arc is done. What I can do is make a pretty fair guess about the first story arc, and my guess is that this is going to be a very entertaining read, especially for those who like somewhat dark crime fiction like Stray Bullets. Winick does a great job of portraying the sort of casual cruelty of crime, from a brutal beating to a cruel and unnecessary murder (well, maybe you can call it assisted suicide) to manipulating a potential threat into a deadly situation.
More importantly, though, Winick and Dalrymple do an excellent job of portraying this particular time and place. The impression given is that Dalrymple must have done a fair bit of research to get the look of turn-of-the-century San Francisco just right, and the clothes that the characters wear have the same sort of verisimilitude as the architecture and set dressing. And Winick gives the same feel of the time and place with the yiddish sprinkled throughout the dialogue (always in context, so even the non-Jewish in the audience will have no trouble picking it up) and a plot point that hinges on the story of King David. The latter borders on being confusing if you don't have a recall of the King David story, but it's relatively easy to find that kind of thing out.
While Caper definitely doesn't slouch in depicting the culture and time period, though, what's more important is that it's just an entertaining story. Winick starts off with a fairly chilling story that shows both the way things are in the family of Isadore and Jacob and the sort of temperament that they had developed even at a younger age. Then he shows us their day-to-day existence, which has some dark humor thanks to the dialogue, and introduces the problem that will no doubt drive the arc. It's solid plot construction with strong characters, the kind of thing I've come to expect from Winick.
Though the subject matter of Caper may be new to most readers, Winick and Dalrymple keep things familiar enough from a storytelling point-of-view that the book quickly grabs the reader's attention. Don't be distracted by the yiddish words you don't understand or the reference to a Bible story you might only half-remember... Caper is easy to get into. It's the story of two young men in a rough time in America, and the story of the kind of pressures and requirements that come with a life of crime.
