I’ll admit it, I didn’t think I was going to read this one. The art looked very spiffy but the story seemed like a James Bond/Sin City/Old Man Logan-style spy adventure, and while I like all those things, I didn’t need a new one. But Dark Horse very nicely sent a review copy of the new edition last week, and I like the trailer for the Netflix movie (and I’m a big fan of Mads Mikkelson) so I decided to try it.
It turns out it’s exactly what I thought it would be, which isn’t bad, but I’m still not sure I can recommend this first volume. (Later volumes? Quite possibly. The Netflix movie? I’ll let you know.)
My only real problem is that I wasn’t surprised by any of it. A retired spy is being hunted by the organization he worked for, except he’s way too big of a badass to be taken down easily. There’s beautiful, treacherous women; canon-fodder assassins; a crazy, torture-loving genius; guns and bullets everywhere; and artful splashes of blood in the snow. The story pans out exactly the way you imagine it would, and the only twists are ones you can predict if you’ve ever watched an action movie even once.
Is that bad? Not at all. There’s something comforting about a gritty, violent spy-story. If there weren’t we wouldn’t have fifty years of Bond films. The anti-hero is an expert at everything, he gets all the women (even the ones who want to kill him. Especially the ones who want to kill him), the bad guys underestimate him at every turn, and he kills them not because he wants to but because they should’ve known better than to mess with him in the first place. It’s a formula, but a formula that works.
But one thing I loved about the Sin City books is an element of surprise, even in the most straightforward story. Someone would fall for someone, or there’d be a clever betrayal, or a motivation revealed, or anything that you hadn’t seen coming.
Here’s the thing, though: I never read the original Polar web comic, or know anything about it, and it turns out it didn’t have any of the dialogue you see in this book. Wikipedia says it was because Victor Santos didn’t think his English was good enough to write dialogue, but I think I would’ve liked the book better without it. The story is so straightforward it doesn’t really need the words. I know Dark Horse felt the book would be more commercially successful with some dialogue, and I get that, but I would’ve enjoyed the fun of figuring out the story without text, and the pages in the book that I liked the best were the ones without any word bubbles at all. (Except for the crazy torture-loving genius: his word bubbles are just as crazy as he is, and I’m a sucker for insane-person-word-bubble-text.)
The other thing is that this book isn’t the whole story, it’s our introduction to the character, and as a sort-of origin story it works very well. I still don’t find the story that interesting, but if you look at it as a long prologue, it makes me want to read the next volumes, which from what I hear get much more complicated.
As for the art, in the end I like Frank Miller’s art a little more than Victor Santos’. There’s something about Miller’s way of contrasting light and shadows, and the flow of movement between the two, that always seemed very effortless and clean to me. Santos’ style is much more angular, even twisted in terms of faces and poses and action. That’s not to say Miller’s work is any better than Santos’, I just prefer Miller. But I admire how much Santos can do with black, white, and red, and there’s a ton of panels that are flat-out gorgeous.
I’ll definitely check out the next volume of Polar (and the movie of course, which has to be based on more than just this volume.) The story doesn’t make for much of a book on its own, but if you saw it as the very beginning of a Bond movie right before the opening song kicked in, you’d think it was a hell of a thing.