11/8/2022 0 Comments Sheriff of babylon 9![]() ![]() “Sheriff” is Alan Moore dipped in Kathryn Bigelow, an emotionally explosive batch of turmoil bursting at the seams of its nine-panel grids and rhythmic widescreen close-ups. In my opinion, the creative team pulls it off, never giving me the impression this should’ve stayed a novel. In this and his other two 12-issue opuses (“The Omega Men” and “The Vision”), King speaks in crafted formalisms, more an architect than a documentarian. Tom King has admitted in interviews that “Sheriff of Babylon” began as a novel, pitched to unresponsive publishers, before he converted it into the Vertigo project that has been part of his rise to comics prominence. These three Americans metaphorically triangulate the coordinates of the road to hell paved with US military intentions. The other new triad that brings the story to its climax is the backstage of the American mission, with Chris, Bob the NCIS blowhard, and Franklin the middle man, whose managerial calm belies his out-of-its-depth operation. It’s three talking heads in a room, yet as rife with tension as any in comics. One is a scene of Sofia, Nassir, and another Iraqi, brilliantly stretched out over multiple issues like a Russian play. Nassir’s troubled backstory, Sofia’s impossible bargains, and Chris’s slow-dawning helplessness converge into a perilous plan that produces two new triads of tensions. ![]() Indeed, the second half tightens the plot even more wrenchingly on the principals. Instead, King and Gerads draw these three with enough ambiguity and faltering intentions to keep them convincing yet unpredictable, right through to the story’s taut end. The trap in representing this morass of embroilments through a small cast is to reduce characters to thin proxies for parties or ideologies. There’s Chris Henry, American police trainer Sofia/Saffiya, US-educated Iraqi peace and power broker and Nassir, an ex-Saddam enforcer whose fierce devotion and necessary compromises make him perhaps the book’s most fascinating figure. It’s all distilled through a small group of characters, primarily the three principals at the center of King and Gerads’ twelve volume war noir. This decency is doubly important because, rather than a slick SEAL Team, special ops story that reads like a mindless first-person shooter, “Sheriff of Babylon” is about something much weightier than “winning”: the specific indecencies of the American presence in post-invasion Iraq. Deals with the devil rarely go right, but in Baghdad, the wrong deal could get lots of people killed… What they want from him is unclear, but it’s a payment they intend to take in blood. Now Nassir is in the hands of the men who may have been responsible for all of it. What started as the search for one man’s killer has turned into something much deeper, and everyone lost something in the violence that followed. In these chapters from THE SHERIFF OF BABYLON #7-12, things are heating up in Baghdad. ![]()
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