Sympathy For The Devil: The Strange Talent of Luther Strode #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… spoilers.

Now that everything is all said and done, it turns out that writer Justin Jordan has done something very interesting with The Strange Talent of Luther Strode: he has created a superhero comic book in which the hero is well and truly an unstoppable killing machine from a 1980s slasher flick. It is Halloween from the point of view of Michael Myers, or Friday The 13th as told by Jason Voorhees, only written as tragedy and I’m not getting my first handjob in a sticky theater back row during one of its Roman numeraled sequels (yet).

Jordan has made a leap in logic that I don’t think I’ve seen before except maybe by those millions of Generation X’ers who bought talking Freddy Kreuger dolls and traded his best kill quips in study hall, and certainly never codified in print. And that is that if an 80s slasher film villain is unstoppable, unkillable, and has some great catchphrases? And if they wear an easily-identifiable costume and or a mask (Freddy’s sweater, Michael Myers / Jason Voorhees masks)? Then the only difference between them and a comic book superhero is motivation and (sometimes) method. After all, where the rubber hits the road, the only difference between Freddy and Wolverine a surface level is the word “bub” over “bitch” and the violent murder of Johnny Depp, to which Wolverine can still only aspire.

And this comic has hit all the major tropes of the 80s horror film. Lead character apparently mutilates entire family? Check. Antagonist is apparently killed over and over and still gets up to do more of the dastardly? Yup. Final bloody shootout with the law that leaves the protagonist apparently dead? Sure. Only survivor the scrappy female lead? Oh yes. However, Jordan filters the entire experience through a simple twist: the “killer” was framed. He was pushed onto the path of being able to kill, and not all the bodies attributed to him are his fault. And by framing familiar plot contrivances through that lens, it turns the story into a legitimate heroic tragedy. It is IMPRESSIVE, and it winds up being one of the more entertaining concepts in recent superhero comics.

But unlike most slasher films, this comic delivers seriously dynamic action, as opposed to just some shambling monosyllabic dickhead giving some shivering half-naked teenaged coed the chop. Where the rubber hits the road, this is a superhero comic – a superhero comic dressed in a girl suit made of real girls, but still a superhero comic- and Jordan writes the confrontation between Luther and the antagonist as a full-blast, violent superhero battle. One with all the busted necks and looping entrails that you’d want from a slasher flick, but still an action-packed sequence. And any comic book where the hero tries to strangle the villain with his, the hero’s, own Goddamned intestines is worth the three-buck cost of admission right there.

And unlike most slasher films, Jordan has given us more than broad stereotypes and nice sets of tits to care about. Because let’s face reality: the characterizations in most of those movies simply wasn’t good enough to carry a modern comic book that wasn’t written by Rob Liefeld (And given the fate of Hawk Dove, Res Ipsa Loquitor), and was only acceptable back then because the movies had boobs and the viewers didn’t have Internet porn. Every character in this book is written well enough to at least care about. We have Petra, whose sarcasm, spirit and sense of humor make the backstory of Halloween heroine (And Luther’s obvious namesake) Laurie Strode seem to boil down to “Hasn’t fucked yet and screams wicked good .” and there’s Luther himself, who is roiling with internal conflict between embracing and rejecting what the antagonist insists is his destiny as a killer. And my favorite, best friend Pete, who in a Friday The 13th picture would get the ick for smoking pot and jerking off, but here? Goes out a Goddamned CHAMPION.

Tradd Moore’s art continues to be a great fit with this comic, and continues to be something that I am having a hard time figuring out where he might go from here. Moore has a task currently matched only by Steve Dillon on Preacher and, more recently, Jacen Burrows on Crossed: deliver a good-looking, entertaining comic that depicts awful, disgusting violence. This comic in particular requires the fight choreography of a Matrix or Chow Yun Fat movie, combined with the blood-n-guts of a Fulci zombie film, and it delivers beautifully. With a fine-lined, somewhat cartoony style that acts as the spoonful of sugar to the Tom Savini buckets of guts, it somehow keeps the book looking light, while showing you a man being Indiana Jones-whipped from the end of his own colon. It is one of those weird mixes that works… and makes me wonder how Moore will ever get work again. Splash pages of a man ripping out another man’s spine doesn’t exactly make the best pitch portfolio for, say, a gig drawing Superman. So where Moore lands next, I don’t know, but for now, I’m glad he’s here.

Being the final issue of a six-issue mini, it’s a little late to get into this book. But if you decide to hunt up the back issues (Or, given Image Comics recent reprinting schedule, wait about six weeks for the trade paperback collection), you’ll find an exciting superhero comic origin story, wrapped in a truly unique concept: an old slasher movie. And, as in all (arguable) good slasher stories, it leaves itself wide-open for a sequel… and Jordan is even good enough to confirm that The Legend of Luther Strode will be dropping in October. Still, be it by issues or trade, you owe it to yourself to get in on the ground floor of this book. There has not been anything quite like it in recent memory.