Customer Reviews

Playback: A Graphic Novel

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Though not an expert (by any means) on the genre, I do love film-noir and had high hopes for this story. This graphic novel, a look at never-filmed script written by the great Raymond Chandler, offers only limited satisfaction.

The story was terrific. A young wife is officially exonerated of her husband's death, but fears retribution from his family who thinks she murdered him. She feels to Vancouver to escape them. While there, another death may be pinned on her. But who is the killer? The desolate young beauty? The aging socialite with the gun in her purse? The mysterious older gentleman? Someone else? The investigation is complicated when the inspector falls in love with one of the suspects.

The tale involves the same easy-to-miss plot points that adorn (bedevil?) old movies, and that need a second reading to pick up. This is not a problem, as it's fun to read a book, once the key to character behavior has been revealed, to see how you were fooled the first time around.

But I found the artwork distracting and hard to decipher. Rendered solely in black and white, without shades of gray, shadowed faces sometimes "read" as weird masks of spilled ink. The inconsistent drawing style made it difficult for me to keep the characters straight. Sometimes I had to look carefully for the one characteristic (an upturned mustache on Inspector Killaine, for instance) that helped identify the character.

I enjoyed the story's twists and the turns of logic that helped identify the killer. Not a standout work, as graphic novels go, but interesting and memorable. A written introduction tells the story of Chandler's star-crossed experience of writing the script.

If you like graphic novels in classic black and white, Raymond Chandler's mysteries, or comics revolving around blackmail and murder, then this Arcade Publishing edition of Playback is for you. It holds plenty of tough talk and strong dialogue, brisk action, and well done characters: combine these with excellent graphic images and you have a very strong pick for personal and community library collections.

Given the excellent production values that went into this hardback edition of the "lost" Raymond Chandler work "Playback," in graphic novel form, it is regrettable that the artwork is of such mediocre caliber. Francois Ayroles no doubt put a lot of effort and vision into his personal interpretation of the plot. Unfortunately, his characters are uniformly stiff and awkward, their facial expressions taut and unconvincing. The citiscapes are drab and uncompelling.

The project of bringing to life Chandler's final effort is a once-in-a-lifetime endeavor and it is a pity that artists of the competence of R. G. Taylor ("Wordsmith") or Ted Slampyak ("Jazz Age Chronicles)," whose proven artistic mastery of bygone American eras was not chosen.

Philippe Garnier sets the stage for a sympathetic reading of PLAYBACK, detailing how Chandler cranked out this script and that of THE BLUE DAHLIA practically in conjunction with each other, during a stint at Paramount Pictures amid a period of intense literary production. Nobody really liked the novel he made of PLAYBACK years later, and Marlowe seems shoved into the case despite his own predilections. The novel in fact seems to me to have borrowed some elements of the Richard Fleischer screen original THE NARROW MARGIN, but here we get a French version that goes back to the filmscript and adds blisteringly ugly drawings by Francois Ayroles. Perhaps complicated tax dodging led Chandler to set the bulk of PLAYBACK in Canada, but it is an uneasy fit, while the "Canadianness" of the plot is limited to tiny little things like, hotels, even four star ones, did not serve cocktails I guess? Thus forcing the heroine to abandon the dining room for a private party where you could order good dry martinis.

That development doesn't even seem plausible. Betty Mayfield is really a John Dickson Carr heroine thrust into a glamorous private eye tale--a woman suspected of having killed her husband, who can't shake the cloud of possible guilt and shame even at the border. Maybe Betty's escape from the cold eyes of her fellow Americans, into the relative peace of BC, paralleled Chandler's own border crossing in some private way unfelt by anyone but the author? Is going to Canada an act of nomadism, or just a furious psychic restlessness? Chandler's witty and acerbic dialogue is ably reproduced in these tiny balloons, but by the end you might be thinking, there's got to be some other novel more suitable for comic treatment? Maybe the old school Classics Illustrated artists knew best, the first law of that house was, We're not gonna do any book set entirely in a hotel, it would bore the reader.

Playback was Raymond Chandler's last novel featuring the ever-popular Philip Marlowe. This graphic novel adaptation takes the same concept, throws out Marlowe and adds the appeal and allure of an old Black and White film noir.

The story was great. It concerns a young woman who is exonerated of her husband's death. Fearing scrutiny from her husband's family, she goes to Vancouver. An inspector follows her and they fall in love. All might be well, but, just like any great film noir, the ending has a twist. This story is reminiscent of the days of the Golden age of Hollywood, with Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Cagney.

The artwork is stark black and white, without shades of gray. Overall it is quite impressive, but sometimes it can be hard to make out what is going on.

Anyway, if you are a serious comic book collector or a crime novelist aficionado and desire something unique for your collection, pick this up. This is a fine pick for a personal collection with quality production values.

This looks like an attempt to emulate "Sin City" with its stark black and white (with no shades of gray) artwork. And the story itself is not bad. But the artwork is terrible. The characters are so poorly drawn that it's often hard to tell who's who. And the uninspired layouts and composition make it a chore to get through. So skip this, and get any volume of Frank Miller's "Sin City" instead.