Comic Review: The Scumbag #1

The Scumbag #1

Image Comics

Writer: Rick Remender

Art: Lewis Larosa , Moreno Dinisio & Rus Wooton

We all love a good scumbag story. From the evil kinds, such as Walter White, to the most peaceful of them, aka The Dude. This is a story about how the lowest of mankind is suddenly responsible for its salvation with an incredible amount of power to spice the mix. From the mind of masterpiece maker Rick Remender, this week we get The Scumbag.

The Scumbag opens up with an outside narrator preparing the reader for who we’re about to meet, as well as they can anyway. The man being the described sounds truly repulsive. Our protagonist, Ernie Ray Clementine, is a relic of a bygone era where life was all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The keyword being “bygone” since nowadays, Ernie is really just seen as a lazy junkie who represents wherever people DON’T want to get in their life. Anyway, Ernie is on and about his drug injecting business, when he stumbles upon a different syringe than the one he had previously prepared for himself. Turns out Ernie just injected himself with something called the Formula Maxima. A collection of nano-machines designed to make the body they’re injected into the perfect super spy and the savior of mankind. This happens in a time of certain convenience since there’s a bomb about to go off in New York, so we can count on him to solve that. Right? Right??

Rick Remender is a tremendous writer. That’s pretty much all you’d need to know, but I’ll clarify. In this first issue he makes a visible effort to make Ernie look as bad as he can an it is hilarious in its own way. Not only the protagonist is put in the most ridiculous and embarrassing situation anyone could ever imagine to be, but it is also right before he accidentally becomes the world’s perfect super spy. Remender also does an incredible job on Ernie’s description, through the eyes of that external narrator I mentioned earlier. The writer manages to give us a clear idea of just what Ernie considers important in life as well as providing an detailed description of the protagonist’s smell and looks in a manner that could make a sensible reader lightly gag in disgust.

The art in this book is downright amazing. I normally go about line art and coloring separately, but Larosa’s lines and Dinisio’s colors were so incredibly well blended in this comic that I must discuss them along with each other. Larosa’s work leans towards the realistic style. A lot of details in muscles, hair, and even in motion depiction, opting more for blurry elements rather than motion lines. Dinisio’s work does wonders to complements that approach. The lighting is abnormally precise on every single panel and sets the transition in tone from a busy NY bar to an early morning in NY streets in winter in a way that gives this comic a singular immersive read. Lettering in this first issue bears its charms, despite not deviating from what we usually see. We get a doozy heroin-induced singing from Ernie and some nicely placed sound effects on every major action contributing to the immersion I spoke of above.

Being a Rick Remender title, The Scumbag has already drawn attention to its release due to the writer’s (rightfully occurring) hype. However, Image’s new series is off to a promising start as we all expected. Not only because of Remender’s skillful writing but also because of an incredibly talented team that is creating this new title with him. I definitely recommend giving The Scumbag a read to see if it’s for you, because it is definitely for me.