The lead of Joe Casey & Charlie Adlard's Codeflesh (AiT/ Planet Lar) is a scruffy specimen: unshaven with a receding hairline, given to jeans and a tee-shirt, Cameron Daltrey is a bailbondsman working in Los Angeles, specializing in bailing out clients more likely to skip town than stay and face their day in court. Only time that Cam doesn't look as if he's gone more than twenty-four hours sans sleep is when he dons a Ditko-esque mask embellished with a large Universal Price Code across his face. Wearing that mask to circumvent a court order, he acts as his own bounty hunter to retrieve the bail-jumpin' scumbags.
One more thing: most (but not all) of the bounty Cam pursues is superpowered. A hulking muscular figure named the Slug, a punk telepath with eyes that look like they've popped out of a Jack Cole comic, a pyromaniac with a flamethrower for a hand - these are the dangerous types Cam favors. His partner Staz serves as the voice of reason ("You like goin' out and kickin' ass on these slobs. That's why you write the freaks. You know you'll have to go after 'em and drag their weirdo butts back in!") But Cam refuses to listen to Staz; he's grown too addicted to the hunt.
Structured as a series of twelve-page stories (which originally appeared in a title called Double Image, then Double Take when it switched comic companies), Codeflesh has echoes of Will Eisner's "Spirit," down to the stylized insertion of its series title on each chapter's opening page, filtered through forty-plus years of grunge-ification. In place of a police commissioner's daughter for a girlfriend, our hero dates a pole dancer named Maddie, who is growing progressively more disenchanted over Cam’s unreliability. (When we meet her, she's fuming because her boyfriend is five-and-a-half hours late connecting with her at the dance club.) The sex may be good, but it's not enough. She knows that Cam has a secret, but his inability to share it with her drives a wedge into their relationship. Through the course of the book we see that split grow wider and wider, until the final chapter, where Cam makes a half-hearted effort to come clean.
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