I’m finally getting around to this one, three years late, and I’m kicking myself for waiting so long. Shout out to Leland who was appalled I hadn’t read it, and got me the graphic novels.
(I’m avoiding the biggest spoilers but I’m hinting at several things, so if you’d rather go in completely blind like I did, feel free to go read the series and come back to the review later.)
The Human Target by Tom King and Greg Smallwood is a classic film noir detective thriller: the handsome, hard-drinking detective is racing the clock to solve a murder, and when the femme fatale walks into his life he knows she’s trouble but he can’t help but fall hard, because underneath her icy exterior she’s got a heart of gold. All that. Except the murder he’s trying to solve is his own. And there are superheroes.
I was worried in the beginning, because I’m not familiar with the Human Target, and for a second it looked like we were getting a flashback of Lex Luthor from before he lost his hair, and I just wasn’t interested in that story.
Nope. What the Human Target (Christopher Chance) does is impersonate someone (for money) and wait to see who tries to kill him, so the customer knows exactly who their enemies are. Christopher doesn’t have any superpowers, he’s just very good at his job. Except this time he dodged a bullet but got hit with a poison meant for Lex, and he’ll be dead in 12 days.
The main suspects? The Justice League International. All of them.
I like how right from the get-go we learn there isn’t a cure for the poison. We don’t spend several issues looking for a cure and being disappointed when it doesn’t work, etc etc. It simplifies things to know the ticking clock is very accurate.
Which means we can sort of…relax? We can enjoy Christopher’s meeting with Ice, their flirtations in elegant restaurants and seedy motels, and their attempts to solve the mystery of exactly who murdered him. (I say this in the past tense because that’s how Christopher phrases it: he’s a walking dead man and doesn’t dance around it.)
I love who shows up. I love who doesn’t show up. I enjoyed the heck out of the story even though I’m not familiar with most of the JLI, but I imagine everyone who is will get an even bigger kick out of the character choices.
Once you finish it I highly recommend a quick reread, because then you’ll see how much of the dialogue (which works totally fine on its own) is foreshadowing all sorts of things about the mystery. It’s very subtle, and incredibly well done.
But the art you guys the art. It’s so gorgeous. It’s a retro style, with blocks of color that make it look almost like the classiest book covers from the 60s, except better. There are no shortcuts, the details in every frame are mind-boggling.
I love the design of everything, the clothes, the hair, the architecture, and even the title pages, the way they merge into the background. I love the expressions, on everyone, especially Christopher’s sideways smiles at Ice. It can be funny, but never silly, and heartbreaking too, and always beautiful. I could go on and on about how stunning the art is, but you should definitely go have a look at it yourself.
I was sorry it’s only two volumes, only because I wanted it to keep going. But this is a story with a definite ending, it wouldn’t work to drag it out. No spoilers, but by the time you get to the end the temptation is to overthink what’s happening, to wonder if there’s a hidden meaning, or if it’s more complicated than it is. I think you have to take it at face value. What you see happen is what’s really happening. It’s satisfyingly unsatisfying, because we’ll never know what happens next. And I don’t think any ending anyone could write would work as well as what we imagine on our own.