The Criminal as Anti-Hero in Comics by Ian Baker

3 faces of Parker: Lee Marvin as "Walker", "Savage" and "Stark" © Warner Bros, Fantagraphics, DC

I was watching Get Carter earlier this week - a film I had not watched for 25 years or so - and pondered that although the film (and the book on which it was based) were created in the time of the Bronze Age, that the concept of criminal as hero (existing in the genre "neo-noir") was not something that had figured in the comics I was reading at that time.

For those of you unfamiliar with the novel Get Carter (aka Jack’s Return Home) by Ted Lewis,  or the satisfyingly faithful film adaptation directed by Mike Hodges (starring Michael Caine) the story revolves around a London gang enforcer returning to his hometown to discover who killed his brother, and exact retribution. 

It’s a compelling story and has been hailed as a seminal “Brit-noir” classic, although if truth be told, the film shares elements with  the 1961 film Blast of Silence (which starts with a train emerging from a tunnel into daylight) and ends on a very similar note as the credits roll. 

Get Carter also shares many similarities in premise and execution with both the book and films of Richard Stark’s (pseudonym of Donald Westlake) The Hunter, in which the anti-hero Parker is on a personal mission to hunt down the fellow gangsters who betrayed him.

3 versions of The Hunter: Paperback © University of Chicago Press, Hardback with plates by Darwyn Cooke © PenguinRandomHouse, Comic Adaptation © IDW Publishing

My first exposure to this type of storytelling was around June 1st 1974  (the weekend incidentally following my first comic-con attendance in Emsworth) when my pal Geoff Cousins and I went to the Essoldo cinema in Albert Rd, Southsea to see The Outfit, a film adapted from an early Parker novel by Richard Stark. I remember being slightly confused that I was being asked to root for the bad guy.

The popularity of these types of films has persisted since Kubrick’s The Killing in 1956, through to the current day. Most notable in the 1960s was Point Blank, the first adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter, the Parker debut starring Lee Marvin as Walker (the name substituted for Parker). 

The protagonist of these films is usually a man untroubled by conventional morality, but works and acts within the bounds of his own code of conduct. A professional with survival skills, only in extremis is he driven by emotions of retribution or revenge. Unlike the purer motives of the Private Detective in fiction, he is only driven to right past wrongs where he has a personal stake in the outcome.  Sometimes mistakenly categorized within the P.I. genre, in fact the neo-noir genre is a genre unto itself. The website The Violent World of Parker is a good starting point for a deeper dive into the books and films that inspire or are inspired by this genre, and is highly recommended.

So how has the neo-noir hero fared in comics? 

It is fair to say that the image of the criminal anti-hero has been a creation of the movies which was then transplanted into comics ,and has been nurtured most recently by creators the likes of Ed Brubaker, Frank Miller, Max Allan Collins, Darwyn Cooke and others.

Crime comics were big in the 1940s and 1950s (Crime Does Not Pay, Justice Traps The Guilty, etc), with a clear mandate to show that criminal activity was a bad thing. Nonetheless,  the tough material was squeezed out during the purge of comics in the late 1950s which feared glamorizing the criminal, leaving the likes of the anodyne DC’s Mr District Attorney to pick up the slack.

Mr District Attorney post-Frederic Wertham

In the next decade, Gil Kane independently published His Name Is... Savage #1 (June 1968), which had an image of Lee Marvin as Parker on the front cover, riffing on the Parker persona by making the lead an espionage agent, and jettisoning the criminal element of the character.

Crime stories resurfaced briefly in 1972 in Jack Kirby’s In The Days of the Mob (a look back at organized crime in the 1940s) , and DC introduced Jonah Hex - (All Star Western #10 Feb 1972) - a bounty hunter who worked outside the law - but this was the closest that DC would come to a criminal anti hero until Max Allan Collins wrote about a mob enforcer on The Road to Perdition in 1998 for Paradox Press (a DC imprint).

Over at Marvel, February 1974 saw the introduction of Frank Castle as the Punisher in the Amazing Spider-Man, and so the idea of a man who operates outside the law and adopts extreme tactics in pursuit of the unredeemable entered the MCU.

Pulp revivals of the likes of the Shadow in the late 1980’s started to introduce a more brutal modern interpretation of the anti-hero, but with a clear understanding that our protagonist was on the side of law-and-order.

Sin City from Frank Miller introduced a neo-noir world in April 1991, but no single protagonist who fit the professional thief mould.

It was Darwyn Cooke who finally brought the character of Parker (renamed “Stark”), the professional thief and hard man,  into the original DC graphic novel Selina’s Last Score (2002), to be followed by a brief re-appearance in DC’s Solo (2004), Stark coming off the worse for wear following an altercation with Batman in the story Deja Vu.

Since then, several American and British comic book writers have created interesting work in the crime comics genre, sometimes incorporating noir themes and novelistic storytelling into realistic crime dramas and even into superhero comics. These writers include Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets, Jonny Double), Brian Michael Bendis (Sam and Twitch, Jinx, Powers, Alias), Ed Brubaker (Gotham Central, Criminal), Frank Miller, David Lapham, John Wagner (A History of Violence, Button Man), Chris Condon and Paul Grist, ably interpreteded  by artists of the calibre of Sean Phillips and Jacob Phillips.

Their work has figured predominantly in independent comic magazines, and increasingly in original graphic novels (OGNs). Interestingly, Sean Phillips was commissioned to adapt the opening sequence of 1961's Blast of Silence into a short comic included with Criterion's DVD release of the film in 2008.  Take a look at his blog for more information.

© Criterion and Sean Phillips

The pioneering work of Darwyn Cooke and IDW in 2009 of adapting the Parker novels directly to hardback OGNs has opened the gate for subsequent creators to bring these sorts of stories to a different audience than the average comic-book reader.

Those of you who have seen Get Carter may recall that the opening sequence of the train journey from London to Newcastle is a fascinating montage of the exterior of increasingly nondescript cities and empty farmland intercut with Carter enjoying the luxury of First Class travel on British Rail in 1970. Carter surveys his fellow travelers and notices that one passenger is reading the The Sun newspaper with the headline “Gaming Chiefs warn of Gang Wars” while a schoolboy reads a comic. 

Name that comic - presumably 1970/1971 timeframe

Can anyone identify the comic?