A Little Fun Down on the Farm

I would say the person who talks to chipmunks might be the stupid one, but you're the boss, lady. I picked up the first volume of Tim Truman's Scout back in January. This is from Scout #2, with Tim Truman on words and art, Steve Oliff on colors, and Tim Harkins on letters.

By this point, Scout (Emanuel Santana) has already killed a prominent smut-peddler who was actually the Owl Man Giant, a monster of Apache legend and one of four Scout is supposed to kill. One of the other four is the current President of the U.S., so Scout's got a bit of heat on him. He's also got a tagalong in the form of Missy, a survivor of his assault on the Owl Man Giant. She doesn't know what the hell's going on, or if it's smart to stick with this guy, but she doesn't like her odds without him, so rock and a hard place.

This time around, Scout attacks Waltz at one of his big farms (where the workers don't get paid enough to feed themselves). Waltz isn't strictly human, either, but with a little help from an autobailer, Scout takes another one down. By issue's end, two of his old Army Ranger acquaintances have caught up, and they'll be dogging his trail for some time (One of them will be after him all the way to the end).

Scout deals with the Four Monsters fairly early in the series, but that doesn't come close to solving the problems of the U.S., so it isn't some happy ending. Especially because by then, Scout's done enough things to ensure people are going to be hounding him forever. And he's set several dominoes in motion he would have never expected that pop up later on. That's one of the things I like about the book, it has the same sense of things being interconnected and building over a period of time that the book Truman was working on prior to this had. That book being GrimJack.

There's an interview in the back of the trade where Truman admits he's the reason it took so long for the series to be collected, because he doesn't like looking back at his early art. I like it just fine, other than I think the monsters could stand to be more abstract looking, less human-shaped. Shadows and limbs that stretch abnormally (the Antelope Monster that appears a few issues from this one has a good decayed, patchwork feel to it.) Scout supposedly sees them as they really are, but I wonder if he isn't still seeing them in terms he can comprehend.

It's not exactly a post-apocalypse setting, because it seems like all that ended was the comfortable way of life Americans were accustomed to thinking was their birthright. The rest of the world has moved on around it, left it a rotting corpse that doesn't even have anything anyone else wants to take. There are times in this book that I think Truman really nailed it on how things would turn out.