Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: The Crow, by James O’Barr.
by Arpad Okay. The Crow strikes an erotic Iggy Pop pose, though the raked terrain of his muscled body is riddled with bullet holes. What bleak corners of the city that aren’t on fire will soon burn at his hands. He’s paying back his debt to the world that killed him. Eric is dead, Shelly is worse, and soon, the men responsible will be, too. The angel of death is a weeping clown, a paragon of wrathful masculinity, frail as a poet, soft as night.
They were a normal couple before Eric was shot in the head and Shelly was assaulted and murdered on the roadside. Go to a Cocteau Twins concert in the Midwest in the 80s, and it’s all sweater vests and skinny ties, too. The makeup and shirtless Wax Trax sex god is Eric performing the ballet he and Shelly loved. His actions, their operatic plunge into a deeper darkness, are orchestrated by the Crow.
Yes, wracked with sorrow while serving as an executioner without compromise, the Crow’s ultraviolent blend of atrocity and justice stretched the definition of antihero as only the end of the century could. The Crow twisted the times: here, what makes him powerful is his sensitivity; what makes her a picture of innocence is her audacity.
It is a book sustained by James O’Barr’s talent for capturing striking moments. Beyond the pinups is a poetic pacing. We are whisked away from the story as it reaches a boil; a bare lightbulb dive bar bloodbath becomes the bedroom back home flooded with sunlight. Eric occupies the dreamlike liminal spaces between his memories and the nightmare of reality, barbed wire and roses, a skeleton in a suit, uncontrollable tears. Reality floods back in with a page turn, and the lights truly go out. The Crow makes a quip.
When I say dark, O’Barr can ink. A body — a one-eyed, open-mouthed corpse — is a sculpture cut from the bare stone of the flat black panel. Yet it isn’t flat. Eric’s face is reflected in a pool of booze spilled on the table; its slick texture somehow differs from the total blackness under the table, and the pebbled reflection of the bar lights off a leather jacket.
The same barely effable nuance of darkness is present in The Crow’s politics. It’s the same world of crack and rape as Frank Miller, street-level superheroes, young reptiles trained in martial arts. A city in conversation with a Death Wish world. Hubert Selby Jr. levels of anguish and blood-eyed diatribes. The Crow regularly recognizes the systemic corruption that begets criminals, but make no mistake, nobody in this book ever had a choice. Or a chance.
As a vendetta story, the focus is on who’s to blame. The Crow asks, is a mid-level street gang lieutenant high on drugs totally at fault for his actions? What would have happened to him if he tried to stop things? Not that he did. And he sure won’t be getting any opportunities to learn from in the future.
The Crow is popularly placed in the context of the slasher movie, where “the gang” is a gang, killers whose executions the reader is meant to cheer for. Aesthetically, O’Barr writes ’em much closer to pre-code horror. The premise is Messed Up. Frank about sexuality (to put it mildly). Dialog heavy, with mad poet mouthpieces. The success of fellow jolly goth Billy the Puppet may have made torture and excess something to be expected from contemporary slashers, but most mainstream cinema monsters were up to some Tom and Jerry hijinks when The Crow was cutting off a man’s fingers and making him eat them. O’Barr’s inconsolable fury reminds me of something Selby Jr. said about writing: “Who am I to edit out whatever’s coming out of the mind to be written? Who am I to stand in the way of it, who am I to say ‘this is not allowed’ or ‘this is tasteless?'”
Tying spent shells into his hair, making friends with tenement pets, Eric searches for the poetry in his monstrous actions on the level field where his humanity was burned down. He finds beauty in hideousness because, for him, there’s no more meaning. Only drive.
As the book moves forward, Eric sinks deeper into the memories that cause him the most suffering. In the real world, the violence — initially severe but abrupt — takes The Crow’s reins. A list of specific names becomes a gang war. Earlier in the book, the Crow was scarier, a ghost hiding in the gossip on the street, in O’Barr’s inky pages. Violence begets violence, stealing the story’s focus. The Crow becomes the fantasy soldier, an undefeatable superhero, mowing down the horde of opposition.
Valor has nothing to do with revenge. It is the darkness in man’s heart that The Crow excites, the predilection to see oneself as the predator taking the prey in a scene of unrestrained carnage, not the other way around. The impulse to become a tyrant when it’s recognized in the self, or to bow in subservience to the superiority of others. That’s not the story of The Crow. This isn’t sanguine violence because it knows the scales aren’t balanced by what it does. There’s no joy in what he’s doing. Eric makes sure his cat Gabriel has a home after he burns the house down. There is a human, good side to him. What the Crow does, what he does, isn’t tied to humanity. How that makes us feel, his dance of blood and hammers, that’s up to us.
The Crow is available to purchase. For ordering information, click this.
Gallery 13 / Gallery Books / $29.99
Written and illustrated by James O’Barr
Check out this 5-page preview of The Crow, courtesy of Gallery 13:
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