Why the Losers are Winners to Me
In his first column for SFX (The UK's leading magazine of all things cool and geeky) Bryan Hitch talks about being a guest at an awards ceremony and feeling out of place. Himself, John Cassaday, and Mark Millar were surrounded by the likes of Andy Serkis, Michael Rosenbaum, John Shea, Michael Shanks, and others, so he got to thinking there was little to compare comic professionals with the film and television greats he was surrounded with. But thinking more carefully he realised comics were, to use his own words, " ... the wellspring for half of the material winning awards." And he was absolutely right. At a time when Hollywood seems to have run completely out of ideas and resorts more and more to reheating old ideas, comics have been inspiration and creation for a host of films that range from decent to great. What would the film industry have done these past years without X-Men, Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, Elektra and more? Granted they could have gone shopping for their fantasy and action ideas elsewhere — novels, university students, or political campaigners, for example — but comics provided a ready-tested story board. Where else could they find that? Films and television are presenting sci-fi and fantasy stories that are new for most people but well known to comic readers the world over. We've even reached the point where Hollywood and comicland have been mixing for so long that the smart people in movies are writing comics: Kevin Smith (finally) finished Black Cat/Spider-Man, Damon Lindeloff is doing wonders with Hulk, Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men had long time Marvel-haters donning hat and sunglasses to camouflage their betrayal of DC at the comic store ... All the criss-crossing with the film crowds is affecting comics and the way they are written, too. There have always been adventure comics, but (to me) it felt as though they only came with supernatural or unreal elements added to the mix. All the comics I'd found didn't seem to think themselves a comic if there wasn't an extra dimension thrown in there for good measure; more fantasy, less fiction, certainly not just plain action. But lately, some comics have been reading more like movies, and some writers have decided it is no longer the preserve of Hollywood to create a fun actioner that hooks readers and has them dribbling popcorn on the sofa as they read. It's great news for those of us who enjoy action movies and had given up on the reconstituted rubbish Hollywood had been serving up. One such book: The Losers. The last issue of The Losers was published on the 15th of February, and if you haven't read it yet this is a wonderful opportunity to go out, buy the entire story from the beginning, sit down in your favourite corner, and let yourself be reminded why action and adventure is cool. The Losers are a C.I.A. run black ops team that accidentally discovered something they shouldn't have and are now on the agency's Most Wanted Dead list. When the story begins, they are, in fact, meant to be dead, but something happened to save their lives and makes them even more determined to discover why and by whom they were betrayed, find them, and put them out of business. Rather than create a bunch of identikit heroes and go the crash-boom-bang way of story telling, Andy Diggle makes The Losers individuals with their own personality and drive. These men aren't heroes; they are people dealing with a situation they didn't expect or want. Aisha, a double agent helping The Losers for her own unknown reasons, reads like a real person, too, even if a woman who introduces herself with the sentence "I was born in a desert place, war was my only mother ... " could easily be seen as exaggerated. This cleanness in the writing extends to the whole of the story. Andy Diggle doses out the information in tiny little drops, disclosing a little bit more in each issue, pacing the story in a way that we discover a little bit about their past and a little bit about their enemy in each issue. This means each time you think you know what direction things are going to go in, it all changes and you are back to wondering what is going on. He does this by creating different atmospheres for each disclosure; this gives a balance of drama, humour, and action that keeps any reader from getting bored. It helps a lot that Jock hit the nail on the head from the start, and all that can be said of the writing — clear, individual characters, a complicated story well laid out, atmosphere changing with the exposition of the story — can all be said of the art as well. Clay, the leader of the team, has an air of Humphrey Bogart in a bad mood, Cougar is a taciturn cowboy hanging around in the background till something needs to be shot. Jensen looks like a geek, if such a geek had been trained to be a black ops operative. Pooch is round, black, and fatherly, worrying about his family. And Aisha looks like a very, very scary Angelina Jolie without the lip collagen implant. The Losers has been illustrated by Jock, Shawn Matinbrough, Ben Oliver, Nick Dragotta, Clin Wilson, and Ale Garza in successive trades, but despite all the artist changes, each issue runs smoothly into the next, visually as well as dramatically, and you never have the feeling of reading a different story or seeing different people from issue one. The whole look of it is old-style action-adventure with strong, bold colours, thick lines, and huge sound effects cutting across angular panels in action scenes, and then it's back to regular, balanced panels with cooler colours and heavy shading for the quieter moments. This book is so good it has gone the way of other good comic material and is to become a movie. According to IMDB, Peter Berg has signed on to co-produce, write and direct the movie for Warner Brothers. It will be a co-production between Berg's Film 44 and Akiva Goldsman's Weed Road. Andy Diggle and Jock are not officially involved, and Berg is said to have finished a first draft of the screenplay, but they have given some advice on storyline and visual style. Peter Berg still has to direct The Kingdom (starring Jamie Foxx, produced by Michael Mann) before he can make The Losers, and there is no word on casting The Losers themselves yet. But the film is not due out for another year, so they have time to make a real beauty out of it.
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