Zeb Larson reviews The Violent #1…
From ED BRISSON (SHELTERED) and ADAM GORHAM (Dead Drop) comes an all-new, ongoing series. Meet Mason, an ex-con and former drug addict who’s trying hard to give up his old life. He’s got more important things to live for now: a wife struggling to contain her own addiction and a young daughter who needs them both. When threatened with losing his daughter, Mason falls into old habits, stumbling through a string of desperate criminal acts whose repercussions quickly become deadly serious.
Readers of The Violent who are looking for what the title might suggest, violence, might be disappointed by this issue. There’s no Kick-Ass style gratuitous blood and gore, no hardened criminals committing senseless acts of carnage, and no protracted gun battles. That doesn’t make this a bad issue, though; far from it. The real violence is economic and systemic, examining the way that people suffer financially because of the limited options that they are left with and the desperate acts that they are pushed into as a result. No, this has the potential to be a far more interesting book than one just about tough guys doing bad things. This is a book about decent people being pushed into doing desperate things. I will be discussing spoilers in this review.
Mason is a recovering addict and ex-con trying to go straight in Vancouver with his wife Becky (herself in recovery) and three year-old child Kaitlyn. He’s working as a mover, though he can’t seem to ever get enough work despite the housing construction boom in the city. Becky works as a cleaner in an office. The pressures on the couple are slowly crushing them: the two can barely make enough money to get by, they’re trying to avoid falling back into old habits, and they have a kid. When Becky runs into an old drug dealer at the same time that her paycheck is shorted (which throws off their rent payment), she will be tested. At the same time, Mason goes to help out an old friend and finds himself in a different sort of trouble.
Given that Vancouver is effectively a character in this book, we should at least talk about the city a little bit. The issues that Mason and his family are facing are familiar to people living in many of America’s cities today. Gentrification is pushing people out of their neighborhoods, which is reinforced by real estate speculation. Meanwhile, many of the old jobs in heavy industry that sustained people have disappeared, leaving them to scrape together a living however they can. Mason’s friend Dylan has a bit of a drunken rant aimed at the hipsters (ouch) taking over the neighborhood. All of this raises the question who gets to live in and use a city. Are they the people who’ve always lived there? Or should they be pushed out? If cities aren’t for working-class people to live in, what are they for?
The critique of capitalism is biting in this book, though I don’t think Brisson ever uses the word “capitalism.” Nevertheless, capitalism hangs over the book like a death shroud, and the consequences of speculation and investment have a powerfully negative effect on the main characters. Mason says that the condos being built all around them aren’t for anybody to actually move into. They’re just designed to drive up land values for foreign investors. This sort of investment is accountable to nobody but the investor-never mind that it will displace working-class people.
Brisson also mentions the impact of the drug war in worsening poverty in the United States. Viewers of The Wire might be familiar with David Simon’s belief that the drug war has really been a war on American inner-cities, creating a permanent underclass of people doomed to live in poverty or fall into the drug trade. Brisson might agree with that sentiment. Poverty is the root of crime in this book.
So, don’t pick up this book if you just want twenty-four pages of guys punching each other. It’s probably going to be a slower-paced book, and it’s about a different kind of violence. It looks like Brisson wants to ask some different kinds of questions about urban life and poverty, and I’m intrigued. I’m looking forward to #2.
Rating: 9/10
Zeb Larson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng&v=3AMx7tPsXgQ
Originally published December 9, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
