Codeflesh is darker fare than I would've expected from Casey - a comic writer I primarily associate with a clever but much less angst-ridden run on Adventures of Superman - but that's to the good. Casey's script is adult (with lots of rough language) and not just cosmetically so; one of the story's overhanging questions is whether it's possible to be a grown-up and a costumed hero at the same time. As a result, our hero's adversaries are calculatedly unglamorous: one unrepentant mobster is dying of cancer, while pyro murderer Rotor has been transformed into a eunuch to attain his flamethrowing abilities ("The price of power, I guess," he ruefully tells Cam.) Reading this black-and-white graphic collection, I was reminded of Jules Feiffer's classic take on the later years of "The Spirit":
"Violent it was: this was to remain Eisner's stock in trade - but the Spirit's violence often turned in on itself, proved nothing, became, simply, an existential exercise; part of somebody else's game.”So it is with Codeflesh, which goes even darker than Eisner in the way it shows how this life is eating away at Daltrey's humanity. The final chapter, which layers the words of an unfinished letter from Cam to Maddy over visuals showing business as usual, nails Casey's point quite effectively.
Adlard's art is grubbier than his work on Astronauts in Trouble, filled with heavy black brushwork and Jack Davis-indebted shadows. It suits the material - better than the heavy-handed little prose poems that Casey writes between each chapter - and crisply captures the mordant world of a guy who's less a crimefighter than he is cog in a barely functioning legal machine. Together, Casey & Adlard have concocted a fine bit of L.A. noir with some nicely unsettling, lingering moments - good, unsavory comic book storytelling. . .
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