The Hunter
by Dan Nadel
Monday, August 10, 2009
Darwyn Cooke‘s graphic adaptation of the late Richard (actually Donald Westlake) Stark‘s The Hunter is one of those books that I wanted to like: An adaptation of a novel I love, obviously the work of a dedicated artist, respectful, well crafted, and nicely put together. So it’s with some regret that I have to report I found it oddly lifeless, a storyboard in the guise of a comic book.
The Hunter, published in 1962, is the story of a criminal named Parker who, after being betrayed and left for dead, makes his way to New York City to take revenge and claim his stolen money. It is the first in a series of crime novels that follow the anti-hero Parker as he first takes his life back, then fights for it, and finally goes about living it (which means more crime). I’ve read about a half dozen of Westlake’s Parker books, including The Hunter. They are precisely constructed suspense stories told in surprisingly minimal and propulsive prose. This isn’t the hard-boiled-yet-baroque language of Chandler, but something closer to Hammett or even Hemingway. The books are so well written and so disciplined that I sometimes wonder if Westlake/Stark invented Parker partly as a way to experiment with pauses and silences in his writing.
So, I could be wrong here, but it seems to me that Cooke fundamentally misread Stark: Though nearly all of the action and dialogue of his adaptation mimics the source, he somehow took a minimalist novel and over-visualized it as a maximalist, over-the-top orgy of genre cliches.
Parker’s entrance into New York City, vividly written as an unstoppable dark march by Stark, he is rendered by Cooke as a grandiose overture, logos a-swirling and dames a-swooning. It’s so hokey and so mannered that I expected a baritone to appear and belt out “New York New York”.
For example, here’s Stark:
He walked north till he came to a leather goods shop. He bought a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of good luggage, a matched set of four pieces. He showed the driver’s license for identification, and they didn’t even call the bank. Two blocks he carried the luggage, and then he got thirty-five dollars for it at a pawn shop. He went crosstown, and did it twice more–luggage to a pawn shop–and got another eighty dollars.
And here’s Cooke:
From the start every room Parker walks into has an Eames chair and a Noguchi table. Every clock is by George Nelson. All the women are outfitted like cheesecake “dames.” And none of it tells the reader a thing about the story or the characters. I’m all for establishing a sense of place—it’s just that all of Cooke’s places appear to be mid-century modern catalog photos. I’ve seen reviews likening Cooke’s set pieces to the use of period detail in Mad Men, but on that show those material goods are not only symbols of status, power, and sophistication, but also objects that suffocate, reduce, and entrap the characters. In The Hunter they just seem extraneous. The absence of such clutter from Stark’s prose is partly why it works; writing that lean allows the reader to fall into the creator’s rhythm. Cooke just piles it on, bogging down the action in a mess of suits and ashtrays.
It strikes me that what Cooke has done here is basically understandable: He overlayed his ideas of crime fiction on top of Stark’s. The beauty of Stark’s work is that it’s elusive and leaves much to the reader’s imagination. It’s modest and seductive in that way. But where another artist might have retained that simplicity of form and language, Cooke seemed to want to fill in the gaps and transform it into a grand production. I can see how he got there, but I don’t think it works.
Even if I’m wrong and Cooke’s reading is utterly faithful, this adaptation doesn’t work very well as a comic book. Cooke’s character design is strangely generic, his storytelling is often unclear, and his drawing, while polished and stylish, is dull. Parker looks like a generic sort of Bruce Wayne, with a face and body language that betrays not a hint of an inner-life. Panel-to-panel and particularly page-to-page Cooke has a difficult time clearly conveying where a scene is occurring and what, precisely, the action and emotions are that he’s trying to draw.
The spread below is a perfect example. Like a noir film director Cooke wants to move the reader around Wanda’s room with variously sized panels to enliven a couple pages of dialogue. But this isn’t film; another cartoonist might have just used body language and facial expressions, along with a concrete sense of place to do the same job. Cooke shifts his p.o.v. multiple times on a single page, and I can’t get any fixed idea of where the two characters are in the room, what the scale is, and what the atmosphere might be like. This would be a little less disorienting if only there was a compositional scheme tying the panels together. Add to that the fact that figure and ground have the same fuzzed out line-weight and you have a very confusing spread.
On the rare occasions that Cooke keeps his p.o.v. and his panel size steady, allowing his characters to carry the narrative load, he’s seems unable to imbue his drawings with life. Below we see Parker killing his first target, his figure abstracted and repeated to heighten the drama. But the abstraction is limp and lifeless: There is no tension in the figures and no sense of the force and weight of this struggle, so what should have been a climactic moment is just another page.
And when Cooke does go in for some form of inky expressionism I wish he’d stuck with more genericized forms. This spread fails on a lot of levels: The figures are stiff, the brushwork tentative at best, and the composition decidedly not dramatic.
When I think of this work I think of what Mort Meskin would have done, with his vibrant, almost ecstatic brush marks; what Toth might have done with his sense of page design and the figure in space; or what the younger Mazzucchelli might have done with his figures weighted in space and rooted in fully imagined environments. I think of all that and wonder at such a missed opportunity. Those guys used cinematic set-ups, but they never allowed style to overtake content. Krigstein, for example, was a master of adapting filmic rhythms into comics. But at the heart of his experimentalism is a drive for clarity.
Oddly, I like the idea of Darwyn Cooke’s work, particularly the notion that he’s some sort of standard bearer of the great action cartoonists of the 1950s. He clearly loves what he does, and his graphic novel is obviously a thoroughly planned and executed book (however wrongheaded). But the trouble is that I never actually enjoy reading him. A stray image here or there is attractive in the same way I like looking at a drawing by his closest aesthetic relative: Bruce Timm. But for me there’s never been any sense of character underneath all that style, and no particular interest in the surface marks either.
I read The Hunter within a few weeks of reading Melvin Monster by John Stanley. Granted, this is a very odd comparison, but stay with me. The material in Melvin Monster was drawn around the same time as The Hunter was written, and Stanley’s verve and control are not unlike Stark’s. Stanley’s storytelling is clear but never didactic, his drawing has a palpable flourish to it, and his stories are consistently funny and surprising. What more do you want from a comic that has to play within certain genre rules? On a formal level seems to have done everything Cooke is trying to do, and with a light touch, too. Cooke wants to make classic, mid-century comics, but seems too rooted in the trappings of storyboards and animation short-hand to allow himself to pare down, simplify, and let the story tell itself.
Stanley, a master of multi-layered storytelling in a variety of genres, makes it all look so easy (though it’s obviously very very difficult). In a way, Stanley would have been ideal for Stark: Each was a master of concise storytelling and rhythmic language. Cooke, while surely talented as stylist and animator, just isn’t capable of that kind if hard-earned comic book simplicity. Not yet at least.
Labels: Darwyn Cooke, John Stanley, Melvin Monster, Richard Stark, The Hunter
Awww…Too bad. I thought it looked pretty innaresting.
Kind of disagree re: the general drawing ability/quality; I think more often than not it's pretty striking. I can see exactly what you're saying here though.
Don't quite see the point in adapting it, not least because John Boorman made it into the (awesome) movie 'Point Blank' – which itself was highly influential on late 60s comics – Steranko's Nick Fury and Gil Kane's Savage being the most striking. Gene Colan was another big admirer.
I always want to like Cooke's comics more than I ever actually do, now I know why.
as for John Stanley, after reading Melvin Monster, and the subsequent praise on line.
am kind of confused, he was a writer wasn't he? or an artist? or both? or sometimes one and sometimes the other?
I want to know what his process was so I can btter understand why he's being depicted as the Auteur of these works. if he wasn't the solo creative force, why aren't whoever else was involved being mentioned?
Cooke's stuff always looked like ad copy to me – I don't read it, just look at it (without much attention paid). I assume he gets a lot of gigs in advertising? I've spotted his style imitated in some pseudo-hip campaigns.
I really like Cooke's work, actually. I thoroughly enjoyed his New Frontier series.
But not this book: that "climax" scene in The Hunter has to be one of the most disappointing moments I've ever encountered in his work…it really pissed me off.
The lack of inner life and generic noir dude stuff was the thing that let me down with this book. after that climax scene I was left wondering who the hell this guy is, some kind of ego maniac who can't accept a single loss in his life without going for revenge? why? he seemed at a low point at the beginning of the story and now he's all confidant that he can rip off the mafia or syndicate or whoever. why?
all this stuff could have been planted in the character somewhere but I kind of felt like as a reader I wasn't supposed to think about these whys. and should just understand that he's a noir dude lone wolf gangster with a chiseled jaw line, accept the fact that he's out for endless revenge.
I've never read the books, But I've seen Point Blank. Maybe it's a testament to lee Marvin's skill, or Just Lee Marvin's catcher's mitt face. but in that film I get an idea of what this man is like inside and it makes the story work. with the comic I didn't experience that.
When I was in art school I always noticed that the animators, when in a illustration class always made the most generic choices possible.
if you asked the whole class to draw a family eating at a picnic,all the animators would draw practically exactly the same image, right down to color choices. perhaps that's actually a skill and part of their training, I can't help but see the same thing happening in this comic.
Parker was just sort of a teeth gritting crime comic stock character.
A fascinating review!
BVS: Stanley was both the writer and artist on Melvin Monster. For his other books (like Lulu) he did not just the writing but also the layouts (the same as Kurtzman for Mad and the EC War books). That's why it makes sense talking about him as an auter.
I have no ill-will toward Cooke, but I'm generally a little confounded by the boundless goodwill the comic community has heaped on him. His work looks like weirdly static Bruce Timm to me and feels strangely dead on the page.
I would be lying if I said PARKER was a disappointment because I wasn't expecting much, but after all the glowing reviews I WAS expecting something more than this. Helgeland's PAYBACK got PARKER more right than this. There's a wonderful moment in the book where Parker has to re-learn how to smile that Cooke doesn't even bother including. And then things like him spitting on Mal's corpse seems out of character and a pointless addition. At the very least I was hoping for the same ending, but it's been changed AGAIN. What's the point? Ugh. This book doesn't work on any level.
I like the book, and if my site ever comes back and I can figure out how to write again I'll finish my piece on it.
I think the writing on it has been largely idiotic, though, and I can't imagine taking any of it seriously in a way that the book would then disappoint. Ninety percent of the positive reviews read like textbook examples of writing about a book that would then disappoint, if you know what I mean. There's not a lot of direct engagement with the work.
Also, I think Cooke's reputation as a standard-bearer of '50s mainstream art traditions is actually a misapplication of his working on period material combined with his occasional statements that such characters work best as close to the original concept as possible, not because his art really works that way.
Also, beating someone about the head and shoulders with John Stanley is jive.
Whoa, interesting review. I'm in the middle of this book right now, so it was doubly interesting.
I think I see most of these points, although comparing this book with Melvin Monster is just looney, no matter how amazing John Stanley is.
The thing I'm having trouble getting is the comparison with the novel, which is likely on target, but that seems more like a criticism of the comic-as-adaptation more than the comic as its own work. Having not read the novel, only seen Point Blank, I only had that OTHER highly stylized (in places) adaptation to compare it to, so I didn't notice the lack of the spare prose.
And, while I'm not always a 100% fan of Cooke's work, I've found the art to be energetic and VERY confident, not tentative at all. I've so far found a lot of the art very absorbing, looking at the different processes he's using, seeing how he creates forms without always using lines, etc. The fuzziness of the flashbacks, etc. I like it.
You're dead on about the Parker character himself lacking a lot of intensity, but then I'm committing your sin, and comparing him in my mind to Lee Marvin in the film adaptation.
On the other hand, your description of Westlake's prose is pretty great–I'll be picking up the novel at my next opportunity. Bah, comics.
I (not surprisingly) disagree with the criticism here and on The Beat of using Stanley as an example. I happened to use Stanley because, as I mentioned in the review, I just read that book. It seems fair enough to me. I could have used Harry Lucey, Jaime Hernandez, Kurtzman, CC Beck, Kane, etc etc etc., but Stanley has been on my mind. The point of the review is ultimately about storytelling. I hardly beat Cooke over the head with the example and wasn't using Stanley as a yardstick, but rather a counter example.
And, given that all of Cooke's work references uses mid-20th century figural forms and settings, one could be excused for thinking of him as a kind of hopeful heir to that kinda work. It's the way he draws as much as what he draws.
Agreed on many of your points, Dan, although I did enjoy the book. It was good but not great. I guess I stand by my comment from when this was first announced that I would rather see Cooke following his own muse with his own ideas and characters. But I'd rather have The Hunter than no Cooke at all, or even more DC trademark maintenance, for that matter.
I agree with you on the Stanley thing, Dan. I don't see the problem with using him as a counter-example in the way you did.
Even though I like Cooke's drawing style, I was pretty skeptical about it meshing well with the Stark/Parker aesthetic from the get-go, so I'm not too surprised by your review. I just need to check out this book to see if I agree with you.
The first three examples you include all support your argument very well, but I actually kind of like the last spread, with the guy coming in through the window.
I can't comment on The Hunter since I haven't read the novel or the adaptation (nor do I plan to, now), but I can say that this review was a pleasure to read. Insightful, clear in its opinions, supported by images, and not too long (a bad habit I myself am often guilty of). In short, an excellent piece of writing.
I guess I feel like it the Stanley-to-Cooke comparison didn't seem very analogous. I recently read Melvin Monster as well, and while I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, showing clearly a story about a family of monsters with a incongruously non-monsterish son is probably a simpler task than the host of narrative and thematic balls to juggle with Hunter.
The book I most recently read was Asterios Polyp, which DID occur to me while reading Hunter, insofar as there was all sorts of crazy stuff going on in Asterios, but the book somehow remained very clear, everything always in view. That's a terrible sentence, but maybe you get the point?
To be clear, I enjoyed this review very much, and will be thinking of it when I read Hunter again.
You guys who can't understand the Stanley analogy are kinda missing the point. Dan is saying Cooke could have used a formalist approach to the narrative.
'Point Blank' is a fascinating fusion of hardboiled Westlake/Stark crime fiction and Boorman's more 'modern' sensibilities. It is indeed a great movie, but it is by no means a totally 'faithful' adaptation of 'The Hunter'. The 'Watchmen' movie called in to question the whole idea (and value) of the 'faithful adaptation', and personally I have no problem with Cooke overlaying his own schtick over Stark's, or otherwise interpreting the material – the very blankness of Parker makes him eminently adaptable as both character (hence him being played convincingly enough by actors as different as Lee Marvin, Robert Duvall and Mel Gibson) and as narrative signifier (of American violence or psychotic individualism or rugged masculinity in crisis etc etc.)
Well, I liked it!
I thought the pacing was solid, the adaptaion striking and the art beautiful and smooth as always. Even this guy's concrete is smooth!
Say what you will, but this was a fantastic book by one hell of a talented artist.
I bought Cooke's book looking for a trashy fun read, but instead found a glamorization of crime and violence. I heartily enjoy a good Hard Boiled novel, but a good Hard Boiled novel goes beyond curvy dames, broken bones and bullets to the brain. I see little to no depth in Cooke's characters. He's undoubtedly talented, but Cooke is better suited to the super hero set, I think.
I couldn't disagree more. I loved the book and I love Cooke's work in general. He's one of my five favorite cartoonists (the others being Alex Toth, David Mazzucchelli, Seth, and Paul Grist).
Dan,
I liked the review well enough, while still liking Cooke's work quite a bit. Good visual examples to support your points, although I have to say I found the criticism of Cooke using Eames chairs and the like to be overkill and maybe saying more about you recognizing things you're interested in and punishing Cooke for it. You want the lean adaptation of a lean novel, but ultimately, someone's got to put some furniture in the room. Would boring, generic furniture be more appropriate? I believe Parker is mainly meeting people with the money to afford the finer things.
I have only seen Point Blank and read this adaptation, so I can't speak to whether the novel effectively conveyed an inner life for Parker, or even if it attempted that. For me, I really liked the scene where Parker's wife's face is shadowed by leaves, foreshadowing the knife wounds he's going to put there, and it's clear enough afterwards that she really did break his heart. I could fill in the rest from there, and maybe it's a rationalization, but it would seem he had set himself on a course to deny to himself any semblance of an inner life.
Totally agree on the generic design of Parker. Not sure why Cooke didn't come up with something closer to Westlake's model, Jack Palance.
There were some fundamental things about the book that bothered me, like some of the characters' motives that seemed impossible to swallow. I don't know if Cooke is to blame for this or Westlake, but the scene in which Mal convinces Parker's old friends (who he's worked with for years) that Parker is going to double-cross them all didn't make any sense at all. Especially taking into account that they had no idea who this Mal character was. Anyway, I just couldn't buy it and it disrupts the flow of reading any kind of story when simple, yet important details like that don't fit or make sense.
So, whether it was in the original novel like that or not, for a book that's just a stylish, comic book adaptation (playing off of yet another other adaptation, Point Blank, the film),you'd think Cooke could have at least made sure that the simplest plot points in the story were air tight.
But ultimately, as Dan already stated in his article, my biggest problem with this crime comic is that you never really get to know who these people are. They're the same flat, film noir stereotypes from fifty years ago, out for revenge.
What might be more interesting is, if you took a look at the swill you publish, and did an equally thoughtful critique. It's amazing to me, that you can't see the forest through the trees.
I guess if I saw some merit in the things you publish, I would read what you were writing with more respect. From what I see, you have no idea of good taste anyway, so it's easy to discount you as a wanna-be.
Isn't the easiest job in the world, to be a critic? Go ahead and rip something apart and then stand there smugly. It's really irritating when I look at the portfolio of your publishing empire, and see amateur rubbish. Why should anyone take what you write seriously?
I also recall, when you went after Dave Stevens, wow, that took class.
Don't be so hard on yourself, Dan.
"I also recall, when you went after Dave Stevens, wow, that took class."
Class enough to attach his real name to his words, Anonymous.
Rich: The novel was written 50 years ago. I don't think Dan says anything about the characterization or “flat, film noir stereotypes” in his review. All he talks about are Cooke's uninspired “face and body language” with respect to Parker. As for plausibility – this isn't always the strong point of this particular genre. There wasn't much of a reason for the Continental Op's scorched earth policy in “Red Harvest” either. I think you just have to accept the fact that these guys are mean and amoral.
Dan: The Stanley-”Melvin Monster” comparison is interesting and I can sort of figure out what you're trying to say but I think you're making things difficult for yourself here. Why not just use one of your earlier examples – Toth on F-86 Sabre Jet! for instance or Jaime Hernandez which you mention in your comments. It's much harder to make the leap from “Melvin Monster” to “The Hunter” if only because of the different needs of children's humor (no matter how subversive) and violent, suspenseful crime fiction. Your comparison does stimulate the mind though.
Ng Suat Tong said:
The novel was written 50 years ago. I don't think Dan says anything about the characterization or “flat, film noir stereotypes” in his review.
I know. I'M saying that they're flat. And Cooke kept them that way. Does every adaptation have to be so literal an adaptation? Why adapt something if you're just going to go over the same old ground? The strength of today's writers are that they can take something from the past like this and take it to another level.
Jim Thompson was part of that same genre fifty years ago and his characters were anything but flat. They were fully developed personalities, based heavily (at times) on real people from Thompson's life .
So, if a crime writer fifty years ago could put you deeply inside the mind of say, a criminal or murderer, then certainly a writer from the 21st century should to be able to do that.
I gave up on Cooke early in New Frontier. All his panels looked like storyboards to me, not a comic book. Also, I was easily confused by how he blocked some of the scenes and his storytelling choices (not to mention the obscene price tag). At a fundamental level I disagreed with Cooke's approach. I've never understood why his work has been so lauded. Maybe for the fact that applying a retro, 60s animation aesthetic to comics is pleasing to people and unique? I haven't read The Hunter and probably won't. This review has verified what I've felt about his previous work.
In contrast to Anonymous, I think that it isn't easy at all to be a good critic and that there are probably the same percentage of good critics as there are good film directors, cartoonists, artists, etc…
This was the first book that I had read by Cooke and I have had my eye on him for a while and this seemed like a great time to check him out. After reading it, my conclusions were similar to Dan's. I think Cooke is a fine artist of surface, but not so good at capturing what might be happening behind the character's eyes. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this (other artists I like who are this way are the before mentioned Dave Stevens, Mark Schlutz, and the master Alex Toth), but there can come a point when the limitations of this idealized, superficial way at looking at the world can become very apparent. Two artists that I found myself thinking about when reading this story is Jose Munoz (who can draw loneliness and desperation like no one else) and Mazzucchelli, who is brilliant at telling you so much about a character in how they stand, what they wear, how they furnish their space. I would think a lot of Batman Year 1 and a weary Jim Gordon sitting on his bed in his underwear looking at his gun, or how cocky Sgt Flass would stand in every panel he was in. My point is that Mazzucchelli took a genre story and gave it richness and depth with every detail he put on paper. The characters had weight that went beyond the script. I would have like to have seen that in The Hunter.
I wanted to know that a woman was a prostitute not by her props, but by her eyes, her gesture. Did she look worn out and tired? Was she young and optimistic? Cynical? Sadly, all the women were indistinguishable from each other.
I still enjoyed the book, but did feel a little frustrated at the missed opportunity.
I was also sometimes confused by the layouts, the page you posted with the woman's face being seen through a chair or mirror or what have you was confusing, and that isn't the only example. I did like the double page spread and the layout of the choking scene just fine though. My wife just put up some of The New Frontier spreads in my son's nursery and I think they are great (The boxing scene and the cave looking out at the Lost Land in particular).
As far as the actual story goes, what I like about the old hard boiled books was the individual authors perspective in general. Sam Spade's dedication to his dead partner at any cost, whether he liked him or not. Chandler's novel about the overall shabbiness of the human race, and how some people rise above to actually do the right thing at often great personal sacrifice, for no audience or benefit. I just didn't find any anchoring idea in this story, with whom that fault lies I couldn't say.
"Point Blank" was great though. I loved it when Johnny Utah let Brodie just surf off to his death. Noir, baby.
Of course Darwyn Cooke's version of The Hunter is going to be a "grandiose overture" of retro animation work. That's who he is. It's like listening to a cover of a Beatles song by Tom Waits and then complaining that he's growling and banging on trash cans.
http://funnybookbabylon.com/2009/09/01/fbbp-110-parker-without-spiders-spiders-without-parker/
You should check out our podcast about this. It sounds like brooklyn agrees.
[…] when we were young men. For two interesting perspectives on Parker, check out Dan Nadel’s review for Comics Comics, and Tucker Stone’s for Comixology. David explains why the Outfit was the […]
[…] material, I enjoyed Cooke’s adaptation of The Hunter but I also understood Dan Nadel’s stinging critique over at Comics Comics: What Nadel objects to is precisely the Nelson Riddle factor in Cooke’s work, the tendency […]
[…] at though. Critic Dan Nadel tore Cooke apart for his art on last year’s Parker adaptation, The Hunter, which hasn’t change much since last year. I like it despite it’s “inauthenticity.” […]
[…] profoundly disagree, but thought the perspective was interesting. You can read the whole thing at Comics Comics. […]