Nixon's Pals

Recently, I made my way out to Salem with my fellow connoisseurs and a few friends as well. We were trying to scope out the area looking for good restaurants to write about and nice sights to visit but in all honesty I mostly just found new age witch shops and comic book stores. While I have no interest in any sort of witchcraft, pretty much everyone who knows me knows that I love comic shops, the bigger the better. Unfortunately, I was pretty much broke that day so I figured I could probably only afford to pick up one thing, and it should be something cheap. Luckily, I remembered a graphic novel that gets a ton of love on the Around Comics podcast, that being Nixon’s Pals for a mere 12.99. This stand-alone black and white graphic novel is a bargain, with added value in the form of pin ups and behind the scenes production notes.

Still I guess it’s not enough to say “you get a lot for your money” when pretending to be a critic like I do. It’s important that the work has some sort of aesthetic appeal, and in that sense Nixon’s Pals will certainly send mixed signals. The quality of the script and the art is top notch but its persistently sleazy pessimism will turn off most mainstream comic book readers. The stories main character (Nixon) is no superhero; he is actually just a parole officer working for the city. The people he is paid to look after are a collection super villains, genetically enhanced hit men, and mad scientists, so not only is the job thankless but also extremely dangerous.

Take for example the first case you see him on, what starts out as a routine check up on a super villain ends with him breaking his arm after having a house collapse on him. It is bad enough when a superhero has a villain get away but when you are a public servant that means tons of paperwork as well. When he eventually does get home he finds his wife in bed with a notorious super powered criminal and things just keep going south from there.

I think you could refer to this book as a fantasy version of Die Hard seeing how Nixon undergoes a ton of physical and mental punishment and still retains some sense of duty throughout the book. What’s more, I kept expecting for him to snap and kill all of his tormentors but in the end this is not a Garth Ennis sort of book. Instead the main character turns lemons into lemonade without breaking too many rules and even saves a soul or two along the way.

I think it is safe to file this one away in the humorous superhero deconstruction section of your brain, side by side with works like The Tick and Soon I will Be Invincible. In other words it is silly but in a wonderfully mundane way, where people have real jobs and super villains spend their evenings in the evil equivalent of an Olive Garden. Also I have to admit I really love the personality that artist Chris Burnham gives this book. His super villains are a freak show of incredibly unique monsters, including one mutant call girl with faces on her breasts and a walking suit of armor that looks like a mix between a knight and a water heater. If you don’t mind the mature subject matter (including a gruesome torture scene) I cannot recommend this book enough. Also: it’s cheap!