The Scumbag #1 // Review
Sometimes you get the best kind of hero. And sometimes you get the type of hero you deserve. This time it's kind of hard to tell. This time it's tricky. The fate of the world rests on the shoulders of the worst person on it. That's the situation in The Scumbag #1. Writer Rick Remender drags an unlikely hero onto the comics page with the aid of artist Lewis Larosa. The story is ugly. The art is beautiful. The drama hits the page with an odious moistness that makes for one of the more promising new series to debut in quite some time.
Ernie Ray Clementine is The Scumbag. He's the teetering about a bar looking for a fix of meth from a guy named Spanish Larry. He's only got a couple of singles, though. When hard-up for cash, every deadbeat from the Trump Tower to the gutter knows what to do: rob from charity. Ernie gets a wad of cash from the Salvation Army and uses it to buy a fix. The only problem is he loses track of the syringe before he can shove it into his arm...ends up getting a fix of something else altogether as a couple of super-humans fight in an alley. Now they're both dead, and Ernie has inadvertently injected himself with the only thing that can save the world.
The fate of the world rests in the hands of a loser. It's the type of story that's been told a million times before. The extreme cleverness in Remender's treatment of the premise lies in the fact that Ernie isn't just a loser...he's totally reprehensible and not at all interested in being a hero (or anything else for that matter.) The one likable thing about him aside from his extreme un-likableness is the fact that he seems to genuinely like the people he thinks of as his friends. (One of his conditions for agreeing to save the world is a Judas Priest concert at the bar he hangs out at. So y' know...he's thinking about other people too.)
Larosa makes it all look so beautiful without betraying the gruesome nature of the life Ernie leads. The bar looks pretty. Some of the people IN the bar look pretty. Ernie... Ernie's ugly the way a beat-up leather jacket is ugly, but there's a real charisma in that ugliness. Larosa balances Ernie perfectly between destiny and destitution as he is contrasted against the unspeakable beauty of the super-human heroism he is being paid to serve. Larosa's amplified storytelling style hits the page with breathtakingly warped depth. He's exaggerating the intensity of everything with vertiginous angles and overwhelming emotion. The first issue of The Scumbag might only take a few moments, but it's a hell of a journey.
Remender takes what might be a tired, old premise and makes it interesting by making the hero as unappealing as possible. As sharp as the writing is, it really wouldn't hold that much appeal without the amplified power of Larosa's art. Remender and Larosa show a deep love for Ernie that breathes through script and panel. If they can hold onto that for the story's duration, The Scumbag could really turn into something special.
