Comics Review: SMOKETOWN Trade Paperback (Issues 1-8)

SMOKETOWN #1-8 (Scout, February 2017-May 2018) Writer: Phillip Kennedy Johnson. Artist: Scott Van Domelen. Colorist and Letterer: Dustin Mollick   

I love crime stories, especially when a good creative team gets involved. There’s something special about eye witnessing how a great artist interprets the writer’s vision and makes it happen from panel to panel.  There’s a good team behind SMOKETOWN, and the works cited as inspiration are gems of the genre . . . . .

 

   From the Previews catalog: “From acclaimed writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson (Warlords of Appalachia, Last Sons of America) and introducing artist Scott Van Domelen, comes the first in an interconnecting series of chapters in the tradition of David Lapham’s Stray Bullets, Brubaker/Phillips’ Criminal, and Pulp Fiction.  

 

     Each chapter explores the final days of a murdered soldier from a new perspective, each one exposing the criminal side of a small industrial Pennsylvania town.  In Chapter One, ‘Killing Marcus’, after a life-or-death situation, a battered wife and mother has until sunrise to cover up her husband’s murder, not knowing that her actions have set her up for a confrontation with some even more dangerous people.”  

Had I read these eight issues as they were released, SMOKETOWN would definitely have made my list of favorite crime comics of 2017. I didn’t stay with it, as the bi-monthly release schedule convinced me to collect them and then read at one sitting (which I only recently did).

 I did consider Issue #1 as my favorite complete-in-one-issue crime comic of 2017 on the former BC REFUGEES blog site. But, as I made the decision to begin anew with POP CULTURE PODIUM in January 2018 I never completed that article. 

It’s never too late to recognize a great work. A trade paperback was published by Scout Comics and may still be available. I highly recommend this to all fans of crime comics. 

SMOKETOWN contains themes of murder, human trafficking, domestic abuse, illegal immigrants trapped into low-paying servitude by a corrupt businessman, an small industrial town in economic decline and experiencing rising crime and drug use, and the trappings of small town America. Those comparisons to Lapham and Brubaker were accurate. 

   What makes the series so memorable is that SMOKETOWN plays out like an anthology of separate stories, although that’s not the case. Each issue has a link to previous and/or future issues, and characters reappear. Everything is interconnected as the final issue brings it all to 

a boil. 

  The two characters that weave in and out of each issue are a married couple with a baby daughter. Marcus is an Afghan war vet troubled by PTSD and disturbing memories who gets involved in criminal activity in an effort to raise his standing with his crooked employer. He gets in deeper and deeper.  Jen is his battered wife, struggling to protect and raise her baby and keep from being seriously injured by Marcus. She devises a plan to murder him and dispose of the body. Every time she believes she’s escaped detection and can get on with her life, more trouble finds her.