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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
All the good stuff,
By
This review is from: The Exterminators Vol. 3: Lies of our Fathers (Paperback)
I came to The Exterminators through being curious about the covers. They really are hard to ignore. Little boy blissfully about to take a big mouthful of cockroach infested cereal. Pixilated insect karma sutra. They tap into the ingrained human fear of insects and `dirty' pests and remind us what creeps into our food and our beds every night, no matter how hard we try to keep them out. Vertigo have always put out great books, but instead of a story starring gods, mythic creatures, ex-green berets or cocky criminals, there's something very down to earth (way way down) about a series like Simon Oliver's "Exterminators".
This is the third volume in the series, and really one of the best ongoing series on offer from Vertigo (following closely behind DMZ and Fables, placing it in good company). The Exterminators story has really begun to branch out and spread itself around in complicated side-stories as the writer and his creative team settle in with the knowledge that they're not going to be cancelled any time soon, but saving us the cokcy complacency of so many `star' creators of the more adult comic genre. The series has primarily followed the likeable and unassuming Henry, an ex-con whose attempts at starting a normal life and job have been far from normal, and in no small part thanks his new work with his father's business, Bug-bee-gone. There's an escalating pest problem in New York city, seemingly connected to Henry's long-term partner's employer OCCRAM and their DRAXX drug (a three-in-one pest control gel, street narcotic, and cockroach steroid depending on the dosage). Then again, there's the mystery of the mystery ancient egyptian locked box, which Henry found in the car of his spectacularly overdosed work-mate in the first volume of the series. Regardless, the exterminators aren't short of work. Surrounding Henry's central story is a complicated series of subplots and characters, in which this particular volume revels. The book opens with what at first appears to be a quirky `date' between Sar Saloth (Bug-bee-gone's resident scientist), and a fellow bug fetishsist, but quickly unravels into a tale spanning mass genocide at the hands of the Pol Pot regime. Meanwhile, after drowning a work colleague in the ocean, the reincarnation of an Egyptian Pharaoh is stuck in the body of the apparently deceased exterminator AJ and laments his host's narcotics addiction while planning how to convince the pests of his true nobility (if its even anything but a delusion). Following on, Laura, having in the last volume mutually ended her relationship with Henry, is spying on OCCRAM from the inside as a powerful executive, while her manipulative sexual relationship with her female boss comes to a dramatic close (Hint: involves a cactus). And throughout all of these subplots, Henry himself has had a run in with his white supremacist former prison cell-mate Cleo Crone, now a white collar businessman who is cutting a deal for distribution of the DRAXX drug as a grand scheme to wipe out `cancer' on the streets, drugging and violating Laura as part of OCCRAM's everyday business proceedings. Of course to lighten the mood, we're also following Miss Perez (the single mother from the nightmarish and unforgettable pest-overrun bedroom scene from the series' first trade) as she gets used to her new job teaming up with Henry as they go steam-rolling some frogs in a swimming pool, and over-inflating a hamster performing rodent mouth to mouth, resulting in some ridiculously extravagant gore (this book is yet to hold anything back... You could hardly call the book `The Exterminators' and not expect to see some animals killed in the process). Instead of simply setting the mystery of the bug problem and the occult-connections and then diving into answering it, the series offers enticing new threads and characters which weave back and forth around the main arc of the story and help drive it forward. It's the best way to tell this sort of long-form series without losing track of the overall story of the series (Preacher, Y: The Last Man have done it well). But with so many side-plots, the main concern now is that the main storyline could eventually get derailed in the process, but writer Simon Oliver has carefully paced the new elements with the original ones, adding new colors and patterns to the soiled tapestry without damaging the overall pattern, and giving enough away at appropriate intervals so as to not frustrate the reader with an over abundance of simultaneous loose ends. The writing itself is top-notch. Very little in the story has felt forced or unnatural, and Oliver has a knack for presenting his characters honestly and exposing the cracks in their veneer now and then. The book always seems to present surprises, starting you down a path to expect one thing, and then giving you entirely another, a prime example in how quickly the reader's pity for poor Stevie and his ant-infested eye-bandages vanishes as soon as the bandages are removed and he realizes his nurse is of the lowly `slave' race. The artwork in this volume is alternately handled by artists Tony Moore, Mike Hawthorne and John Lucas, but still retains a consistency due to the skills of the excellent colourists (Brian Buccellato and J.D. Smith), who between them lift the otherwise pretty good art to an appropriately hot and humid L.A. tone, with a splash of raw sewerage for flavor. The artwork itself fits somewhere between cartoonish and raw realistic, which lightens the mood enough to keep the story from taking its gore and cruelty too seriously. The appeal in this series is its low down and very human dirtiness. Nothing is sugar-coated, and we are forced to face the reality of our own human waste and that the pest rat doesn't just magically disappear when you call your exterminator, all the while subconsciously presenting the question whether humans are actually any better than the pests that frighten and disgust us. For all the horrifying bug and rodent moments in this volume and the two preceding it (and there are LOTS), there's something much more disgusting or cruel being innocently and unquestioningly committed by any of the book's many characters, regardless of wealth or social status. There's something very fascinating and unpretentiously human about this series. It genuinely casts the people we take for granted as the heroes of society. As Page (Henry's new girlfriend and book fantasy prostitute) puts it in volume 2, "[Henry] isn't a writer, thank god, or an artist, performance, conceptual or otherwise... He's one of those people who, unlike anyone here, actually contributes something real and worthwhile to society. Killing Bugs." This volume and the two preceding it are thoroughly recommended if you've ever liked anything from Vertigo before, but be warned, the books feature animal and human gore, very adult situations, loud squishy sex scenes, sewers full of human waste, drug use, and some truly worst-nightmare bug scenarios which will keep you awake at night. In short, all the good stuff.
1 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Never Read It.,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Exterminators Vol. 3: Lies of our Fathers (Paperback)
It hasn't arrived at my house yet, but it's supposed to be here today. I know I can count on it being here today as a matter of fact because Amazon guaranteed if I ordered in the proper time frame that it would be. It damn well better be. I want to be the first to see whatever it is that is blurred out on the cover. I liked parts 1 and 2 very much. It kind of reminds me of Lost except I don't want to nail everybody I see.
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