You’ve Gotta Keep The Devil Way Down In The Hole: Red Team #1 Review

When it comes to comic books by Garth Ennis, sometimes it feels like a coin toss as to which writer you’re gonna get: the writer with a laser focus on the behaviors and traditions of regimented subcultures, or the writer who’s over the top, balls out nuts. When it comes to Garth Ennis, it seems like it’s either heavily researched war comics, or sci-fi western pilgrims with a rifle and a hard-on for Jesus. Battlefields versus Crossed. Max Punisher or Marvel Knights Punisher.

When Ennis goes serious, he goes serious; his war comics – even the ones where he goes more toward the fucked up, like Stitched, a story about some soldiers stranded in Afghanistan being hunted by zombies – feel like he spent some serious time hanging out with soldiers, learning a lot about tactics, weapons, and their relationships and ways of talking. Now, I’ll grant that I’ve never spent any time around people with a serious military background, but those stories feel like Ennis spent some time with real people who have really done the things that he’s writing about.

Ennis’s latest series, Red Team, similarly feels heavily researched. However, it feels like it was researched by way of some things I have spent a lot of time around… those things being The Shield, The Wire, and Homicide: Life On The Street. In short: Red Team feels more like Ennis’s take on some of the better American cop shows (by way of Dirty Harry’s Magnum Force) than it feels like an authentic police story.

But with that said, I like all those shows. So does Red Team stand up to them?

NYPD Detective Eddie Mellinger is having a mixed kind of day: on the plus side, he’s being allowed to smoke cigarettes in a New York public building, but on the minus side, it’s because he’s confessing to having, along with his unit, murdered a suspect in cold blood. Mellinger is part of a major case unit called the Red Team, who has been investigating Clinton Days, a criminal jack of all trades, from drug dealing to human trafficking. A narcotics detective on loan to Red Team has just been killed while working undercover, with all witnesses killed and leaving Days in the clear, so Red Team has decided it’s time to kill him. They make a plan, pick up drop pieces and break into Days’s mistress’s house… and kill him dog dead; no problem. No cops follow them, no one suspects them, no one’s looking at them for it. In short: it’s the perfect crime… so why not try it again?

Right out of the gate, I liked the general structure Ennis has put into this story. By opening with Mellinger in interrogation while flashing back to the actual planning and violence, Ennis builds some tension in right out of the gate: we know that, despite what appears to be the perfect crime, something must eventually go wrong. Does the team get caught? Does someone get killed? Does Mellinger – who according to his own narration, is the only one who really hesitates before agreeing to kill a suspect in cold blood – rat everyone out? Seeing that there’s an aftermath before the action even starts puts a sense of foreboding over the proceedings that make the stakes feel elevated even as they seem to go so well.

The flashback / interrogation structure also allows Ennis to put us directly into the head of one of the conspirators. Having Mellinger answering interrogation questions in the form of monologue captions over the flashback actions helps to humanize at least one of these cold blooded killers, and it really needs it, as on a real surface level, this story is reminiscent of Magnum Force. With that kind of comparison being obvious to anyone still watching G4 for some treasonous and unfathomable reason, having a somewhat reluctant voice to separate this team of rogue cops from the severe right ring reactionaries of that story is important to keep this from turning into, well, The Punisher. The narration serves to help bring home the weight at least this one cop is feeling at having crossed the line into vigilante murder, and keeps the story from descending into a visceral, “Yeah! Kill all the scumbags!” revenge fantasy.

The downside is that, at least in this issue, we only really get to know Mellinger and the team’s leader, Duke, on more than  a surface level. We’re inside Mellinger’s head, and we see Duke talking to the precinct’s Captain for a couple of pages to see how protective he is of the unit, and how involved he is in their personal as well as professional lives, but George and Trudy are, so far, pretty much ciphers. Trudy is the female cop who works harder than everyone else to prove she’s not an affirmative action case, and George is the guy who came up through the ranks with Duke and has his back no matter what… and that’s exactly as much as we know. At least so far, these two characters are all but cop show cliches you could pick out of any police procedural after Hill Street Blues, and the sense I got from them was either that Ennis plans to tell us more about them later, or worse? We don’t need any more because they’re the ones who get killed. It’s too early to tell for sure, but I really got the sense that these two characters could easily star in a spinoff named Cannon and Fodder: Street Pizza.

And speaking of spinoffs and Hill Street Blues: this comic feels a hell of a lot more like a cop show than it does a hard-researched, realistic police story. I’ve already addressed the parallels with Magnum Force, but this feels like a mashup of every decent cop show of the past twenty years. We’ve got mentions of Red Ball cases straight from Homicide: Life On The Street (and yes, I read David Simon’s book upon which the series was based, and I know that “Red Ball” cases are a term that was used in Baltimore, but Google “Red Ball” and “NYPD” – you’ll get mentions of that book and of Law And Order: Special Victims Unit). We’ve got street hustlers with names like “Boogie” that could come straight from The Wire. Grizzled old timers saying, “The shit a man has to swallow, doing this job.” All it’s missing is John Munch, for Christ’s sake.

But you know something? I like those shows. I know that they’re overly dramatic and only as realistic as they need to be to suck the viewer in, but they work for me. And because of that, I’m willing to overlook that every dirty cop we’ve seen turning on the public in the past five years is less a case of master criminals performing a hit and more a mouthy douchebag firing less-than-lethal weapons and passers-by without even wondering if there’s a camera around. So yeah, this feels more like a cop show than a well-researched cop study, but there’s enough atmosphere and illusion of realism to keep me interested enough to see how things progress.

Craig Cermak’s art is… well, fine. This is a straight-ahead cop story, and Cermak delivers straight-ahead art. It’s not particularly stylized or tricky, it’s just realistic figures with expressive faces. Granted, most of those expressions are of grim determination, but when the scene changes to Mellinger in the box (like in Homicide! Get it?), Cermak shows some legitimate anguish on the poor bastard’s face. There isn’t even a lot of violence or gore here to really make the visuals pop (the one shooting we see happens off camera, but again: the surprised fear on Days’s face is well-rendered), but the storytelling is clear and the panel layouts simple to follow. Look: the art isn’t anything particularly special here, but it serves this kind of simple cop story as well as it needs to.

Red Team #1 has Garth Ennis working in his realistic mode as opposed to his crazy shit mode (although it’s early; the Red Team’s next victim theoretically could be the Greenwich Village Frantic Masturbator), so it’s about as serious as you’d expect from that kind of story from him. But there is no denying that the “realism” here is by way of every gritty “realistic” cop show on American television since 1993. So how you react to the story will probably depend on how you feel about shows like The Shield. Personally, I’m into them, so even though there’s a certain derivative feeling, and a couple of undeveloped characters who feel destined to be drinking coffee in the break room with Giardello in Red Team: The Movie, I’m gonna give at least the next issue a shot.