Welcome to the First Issue Bin, where I — Ethan Kaye — randomly grab one of this week's comics that’s just starting up and giving you the details on whether it should get added to your collection … or remain on the comic shop shelf.
Freddie the Fix #1
Writer: Garth Ennis
Artist: Mike Perkins
Colorist: Mike Spicer, Andy Troy
Letterer: Rob Steen
Editor: Joe Pruett
Image Comics' Freddie the Fix is the first book from a new horror imprint, Ninth Circle, an ambitious collaboration of some rising stars (Marguerite Bennett, Ram V) and some established pros (Garth Ennis, Joe Pruett). It's got some expectations riding on its launch, but does it work?
The story, by prolific industry veteran Garth Ennis (The Boys, Preacher) and artist Mike Perkins (Captain America, The Stand) is tailor-made for HBO MAX. Freddie, an acknowledged out-of-place Black Englishman in Los Angeles, makes his living covering up the crimes, peccadilloes, and scandals of the monsters who live there. And yes, they're monsters: werewolves, vampires, mer-people (both half-woman-half-fish and the Creature From the Black Lagoon kind), and talking crabs.
In this done-in-one story, Freddie is hired by a studio head to cover up the death of the Boogeyman, a child-abducting phantom with a horrid history. The case takes him through sex dungeons run by vampires, an OnlyFans set specializing in intelligent-crab-on-women porn, and a valley of dinosaurs who have found Christ through the Methodist Church. It's a classic whodunit with a visually interesting cast and all the twists and turns you'd expect from a noir detective story.
I have to come down on the side of "it's not for everyone, or even most people." Ennis is an acquired taste and even his mainstream work like DC's Hitman has angles that can turn people off. Amazon Prime had to shave down the rough edges of The Boys for it to make the jump to TV. He writes for adults, but even among adults, he's not everyone's cuppa tea. (That being said, his sporadic series with John McCrea — Dicks, about two Irish detectives — is a must-buy anytime it comes out).
It's when Ennis dips back into the hyper-sexualized content is where he loses me. It's territory that he's run through a million times at this point, from the depths of "zombies kill and fuck everything" in Avatar's Crossed to "anything goes" of The Boys. He does it well, but I groaned when I realized that his take on the supernatural detective genre in Freddie the Fix was going to turn into another Garth Ennis gore and screw fest.
There are some good gags in it though, and to that end I think it hews closer to the unpredictable comedy of Dicks. The Christian dinosaurs talking about their back problems is great. I liked the intelligent crabs taking time off from their OnlyFans filming to hang out, play cards, and discuss the drawbacks of filming live, unedited porn. When Ennis is at the height of his absurdity, he tends to explore what the air is like up there as though it's totally normal, and that's fun to read.
But where Dicks has the semi-cartoonish art of John McCrea to lighten the mood, the realistic art of Mike Perkins means that all the weird and awful and bloody feels more serious than it probably should. It's great art — some of Perkins' best — but it falls squarely on the side of grim n' gritty, making the book's tone a little too serious for its own good.
I think Ennis and Perkins have created an interesting world, a well-crafted story, and interesting characters, but Ennis's habit of pushing the envelope hinders him in this instance. What did they say about GG Allin's first album? "For those who like it raw?" That's what I'm getting from Freddie the Fix. Not everyone likes it raw, but I guess there are those who do.
Verdict: For mature readers only, but even mature readers might stay away.
