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Scalped #4
Posted 14 May 2007
Writer: Jason Aaron
Artist: R.M. Guera
Artist: Jock (cover)
Colors: Lee Loughridge
Publisher: Vertigo
5.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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Vertigo is justly proud of its oft-quoted reputation as “the
HBO of comics.” But several of its series could also
collectively be thought of as “That Other ’70s
Show.” The decade remembered mostly for its fashion statements
by current sitcoms and bands is recalled by Vertigo writers as a time
of military quagmires abroad and niche civil wars at home.
Peter Milligan’s brilliant Human Target run brought the
Weather Underground up to date a few years ago; the recent “Brother
#38” arc in Simon Oliver’s Exterminators revisited the killing
fields of Cambodia and some furtive surviving culprits over here;
Jason Aaron’s The Other Side brought the Vietnam War back to
life with frightful fidelity; and Aaron’s Scalped reflects on
the eerily erased-from-history unrest in the Nixon-era Native American
community.
“In Scalped #4 irony piles up like anonymous
bodies.”
There was a time when America’s former tenants took over
whole islands, shot it out with federal agents and were targeted by
numerous lethal government plots, and Aaron fast-forwards this legacy
to a present day of abject poverty, mob-like casino scams and
desperately narrow options (with superb art, both spontaneous as a
sketch and sharp as photojournalism in its sense of elusive moment and
telling detail, by R.M. Guera).
The layers of hopelessness are as dense as the intrigues and
counter-plots are intricate in this first part of a new story arc.
Though it has the feeling of an interlude after the jarring violence
of the earlier three issues, it’s charged with an anxiety of
buried secrets and simmering consequences that may be even more
intense.
Dash Bad Horse is a wayward son of the Prairie Rose Reservation,
who drifts back to become an enforcer for the corrupt Chief Red Crow,
who’s building a multimillion-dollar casino and seeking to both
rule the local rackets and suppress protests from more public-spirited
tribe members. But the chief answers to more shadowy interests, while
Dash may even raise that ante – since he’s really an undercover
fed investigating the chief’s dirty dealings.
In Issue #4 irony piles up like anonymous bodies, as we peer into a
past where two other FBI agents were gunned down by the chief in his
younger days as a would-be revolutionary, a secret he keeps with the
main casino protestor, Gina — his former comrade and
Dash’s estranged mom. Red Crow is troubled by the remnants of
his conscience as he comes to tell Gina he can’t guarantee her
protection from his even more ruthless bosses, and Gina goes on a
fruitless search to connect with Dash before she leaves the Rez on a
prison visit to the fallguy doing time for the decades-old shooting.
Meanwhile Dash is dallying from his usual circuit of headknocking as a
tribal policeman to obsessively surveil his old flame, the
chief’s daughter Carol — a suicidal slip that also might
just quiet any suspicion of his actual mission, if he survives to
complete it.
The final scene, with Gina unknowingly driving past Dash sleeping
in his police car in a ditch right inside the reservation limits, as
she guiltily goes to a rendezvous with a casualty of the same
government her son now secretly works for — a portrait of
perfect futility for both his desire to escape the Rez and her dreams
of standing by it — is as heartbreaking as hardboiled crime
fiction gets. And a bravely unblinking look at the unfinished
business of clearing our country’s conscience. How everybody
gets out of this one is a mystery worth every reader keeping their
eyes on.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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