THIS ADVANCE REVIEW OF STRINGER CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.
by Jarrod Jones. The tennis circuit of 1983 was a time of giants. John McEnroe ruled the roost following his Wimbledon victory over Chris Lewis, despite his unruly behavior on and off the court. Whether he was fighting with his crowds or linesmen or the media who ate up his particular brand of horseshit, McEnroe was the indisputable king of tennis in the early Eighties. (With apologies to Wilander and Lendl.) Another king of the sport, or any sports from that time, was cocaine.
There was also famed tennis playboy Vitas Gerulaitis, whose exploits with nose candy and supermodels were the fodder of tabloids and tsk-tsking sports columnists who worked the tennis scene in the late Seventies and the decade to follow. Patrick Kindlon and Paul Tucker, who made Nobody is in Control together in 2020, don’t show affection so much as a fascination for the sport of tennis and the moment when the cultural roil of cocaine held its most significant sway. And here comes Stringer, their story about a frequently repentant fuck-up racquet stringer named Tim (Tim!) who blunders his way into a million dollars of blow and then finds all kinds of ways to lose it.
Stringer is fun if you have the energy for it. Kindlon is as much a critic of comics as he is a writer of them; when you read his books, you can feel him wriggling under the oppressive weight of what he believes can (or should) be corrected in the medium. Stringer works the comics medium and its trappings by employing the methods of Morrison and Moore and Chaykin, and also, in a strange way, Eisner. It works, more or less, by putting the themes of its story to work on the page in a way that creates a visual praxis for what Kindlon and Tucker want to accomplish.
Luckily, they want a good time, and Stringer provides that in its better moments. As a drug-fueled descent into various hells, Tim’s series of increasingly poor decisions is an unspooling of decadent delights. He isn’t a drug kingpin (he isn’t even a competent dealer), yet Tim gets fingered as the mule who gets to schlep one mil worth of coke through Europe just the same. He’s a Sandler-esque schmuck who finds all sorts of bewildering ways to turn his skill at stringing racquets into a proper drug racket. (Don’t blame me for that one; the joke’s in the book.) You’ll also find comparisons to Uncut Gems in other places, like how Tim’s life choices compound and lure in a string of oddballs who threaten to ruin the European tennis tour where Tim finds his employment.
Tucker gets the scenic, period-specific beats down pat, though his characters shift off-model more than they don’t (Tim himself sometimes looks like Ron Jeremy, other times, he looks like Peter Dinklage). When Tim needs a hit to get through the next hour (which is often), he pulls out cocaine spoons the size of ladles—and while a charitable read on Tucker’s depiction might include allusions to the excess of the 80s and the drug culture that fueled it, a less pretentious take might suggest that every time Tim says “time for work” and holds the spoon up to his face, it looks like he’s about to devour the winter-white pile like they were Frosted Flakes: Oops, No Flakes.
Still, Kindlon and Tucker flex impressive muscles when they’re pushing the possibilities of storytelling within the medium (it’s something Kindlon says modern comic creators don’t do often enough) with tennis volleys creating trajectory lines that intersect and become panels within the story. Other sequences require the reader to flip their comic (or, in this reviewer’s case, smack the rotating button on his laptop) to observe the seedier underbelly of criminal acts in the periphery of the tennis tour. One recurring bit features a one- to two-page spread with racquet strings functioning as a panel grid. It’s all showy, and quite a bit of it works to the book’s period-specific aesthetics; some a lot of the time, however, it gets in the way of what is otherwise a propulsive story.
More successful is Wallace Ryan’s lettering, which—I’m thrilled to report—is done by hand, and while Ryan’s differentials between a period and a comma tripped me up more than they didn’t (causing me to re-read panels quite a bit), I admire any project that puts pen and ink to an actual sheet of parchment. Ryan’s balloon work might get clunky from time to time—they oscillate between ovals and oblong rectangles depending on the panel’s exchange—but he always makes it abundantly clear how the page should read, especially during Stringer’s more ambitious layouts.
I’ll take a big swing any day. Stringer might not dramatically stack up to the weight of its decadence, but its solid thwacks will crack grins and inspire been-there chortles. (Erm, perhaps not for everybody.) As an outré exercise in American-made sports comics—a rare gem if there ever was these days—there is no reason not to recommend Stringer. Crime comics could do with a few more dopes like Tim, and it could certainly do with more creators with the swagger to conjure his like.
7 out of 10
Stringer HC is available in comic shops now. For ordering information, hit up your local comic shop.
Image Comics / $22.99
Written by Patrick Kindlon.
Art by Paul Tucker.
Letters by Wallace Ryan.
Check out this 4-page preview of Stringer, courtesy of Image Comics:
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